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MySQL as mid-range database Glance into to book "MySQL & mSQL" by Randy Jay Yarger, George Reese & Tim King (O'reilly) by Randy Jay Yarger, George Reese & Tim King History In the world of computing, the 1990s may be called the decade of open source software. From Linux to perl, from palmtop to mainframe, the open source movement has left a mark in pratically every niche of technology. This impact is especially strong in the commercially neglected world of mid-range server application commonly needed by nonprofit organisations and small businesses. The idea of mid-range servers was fairly rare in the first few decades of the computer age. Computers were expensive items used by large institutions such as banks and universities. Enormous time-sharing servers provided the computing power for entire companies. Much of the software running on these systems was as monolithic as the servers themselves. After all, because only one computer was serving several departements that computer had to fulfill everyone's needs. At the other end of the spectrum was the personal computer. With the PC revolution, you could find one computer for every household instead of one computer faor an entire company. While these computers were easily powerful enough to satisfy the needs of a sigle user, a wide gulf still existed between the capabilities-and the cost-of personal computing and corporate computing. | ||
| Mid-range computing The area where this gulf was most aparent was in data management. Database applications for large mainframe servers included every feature possible. Because of the multipurpose nature of this software, if any odd feature was needed ba a single user, it was included. Database applications that satisfied those data management needs of the individual user emerged. However, where mainframe databases were too massive for mid-range needs, personal databases were too narrow. In the half of the 1990s, the lowly personal computer had advanced to the point where it was actually more powerful than the mainframe computers of yesteryear. while hardware was no longer a barrier to mid-range computing, the lack of affordable software was. To meet the data storage needs of a nonprofit organization or small business, you needed an affordable server operating system and an affordable database management system. The introduction of cheap and powerful server operating systems like Linux helped solve the operating side of that equation. |
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| MySQL DBMS MySQL is a solutions that solve the database management side of the equation. They are powerful and flexible while at the time lightweight and efficient. Mysql packs a large feature set into a very small and fast engine. While neither database engine has anywhere near the full feature set of expensive corporate databases, they easily have enough of a feature set to meet the needs of mid-range database management. MySQL is one of the most popular applications offering public source code. |
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| Experience "I'm working on a system implemented using Perl, DBI, Apache(mod_perl), hosted using RedHat Linux 5.1 and using a lightweight SQL RDBMS called MySQL. The system is for a major multinational holding company, whisch owns approximately 50 other companies. They have 30'000 employees world-wide who needed a secure system for getting to web-based resources. This first iteration of the Intranet is specified to handle up to forty requests for web objects per second(200 concurrent users), and runs on a single processor Intel Pentium-Pro with 512 MB pf RAM. We develop in Perl using Object-Oriented techniques everywhere. Over the past couple years, we have developed a large reusable library of Perl code. One of our most useful modules builds an Object-Relational wrapper around DBI to allow our application developers to talk to the database using O-O methods to access or change properties of the record. We have saved countless hours and dollars by building on Perl instead of a more proprietary system." Jesse Erlbaum. |
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