[PHP] Can php/mysql handle 10000s of records

[Jay Blanchard]

[snip]
I am writing an attendance system in php/mysql for my school. We have a
little less then 1000 students. For every day of the school year one
record will be entered into a table for each student representing their
attendance status (present, absent, late, etc...). I also have several
other supporting tables for relationships. When it comes to reporting
and querying this DB I am worried that it will very quickly become very
large and slow. Can mysql handle this? Are there any techniques to
speed it up? I will trying indexing major columns.

I have also considered keeping all previous days attendance in a
separate table from the current days attendance and moving things over
in the middle of the night. This way any operations on the current days
data will go quickly, but reports on long term things will still be
slow. Good idea?
[/snip]

The short answer is that 10000s of records is no problem dependent upon
the server, good coding, and good database optimization. We process
millions of records each day with PHP and MySQL (today there are 58M
records to be processed). Over time we have found bottlenecks and
cleared them up. This is being done on a sub-1Ghz server (but I am
looking forward to an updrade!).

HTH!

Jay

[Jay Blanchard]

[snip]
Suprisingly MySQL is very good, as the others have said... I've been
involved in a few sites that have been known to hammer the DB pretty
hard.. And it's stood up to the test... Hmmm... I am sure others here
can validate this... But I think the size limit for the database is
about 4 gigs!!! That's a ton...
[/snip]

Actually you can set tables to exceed 4Gb ... some of the tables we have
are currently in excess of 45Gb