Access or MySQL / ASP - When to use what.

[Jon T]

I have done 3 small sites so far using Access. While Access is easy to use / setup, I feel I am getting closer to doing some large sites where I should not use Access for the Database.

I am trying to find the Access Limit / MySQL Start for the Number of products, connections / traffic.

I have had some say, Unlimited items but max of 6 connections to max of 500 connections and max of 250 items in the database for Access.

These are hardly solid answers when put side by side...

When should I stop using Access and start using MySQL for a Database?

TYIA!

[raf]

When should I stop using Access and start using MySQL for a Database?

Right now :D

Seriously. There’s nothing wrong with access, but i only use it for single user or almost single-user application. I wouldn’t recommend using access when you have 20+ users. Maybe even with less users.

MySQL can deal with 500 and more simultanious users. I recently came across an article that compared 5 db’s: Oracle 9i, MySQL 4, IBM’s DB2, MsServer (Acsess ‘big’ brother) and something else.

MySQL could keep up with Oracle 9i for throughput (number of processed pages) and responsetime. It performed only marginallly less good then Oracle, which is quite impressive (since it’s a free product and Oracle is real expensive) DB2 could keep up until 550 simultanious users. Then there was a great dropback in performance.

MsServer? Hahahahaha. It’s kinda off a diferent league. So no use in comparing Access with MySQL or Oracle.

In short: switch to MySQL, unless you’re developping stuff that wount be used by more then a few users.

The downside on MySQL : some goodies, like rowlevel locking, clustering, foreign key references etc aren’t available (yet) and some other things like subquerys (“subselects”) only came available recently.

[Jon T]

raf

Thanks for the post! This is exactly what I was looking for.


I have never made a MySQL Database, before I head over to MySQL.com to do some reading. What is the best way to manage a MySQL Database?

Command Line? or the MySQL Appliation?

I would almost prefer Command Line if at all possible.

[raf]

I always used MySQL front.

It displays the syntax in the botom part + you can use the commandline in there.

Most people use phpMyAdmin.

Using the commandline come inhandy cause it's more a less the same as when you use PHP to interect with your db.