Question

I am looking to create a database that will essentially have just a few tables, but with the potential for millions of rows.

Let’s say the site is an image sharing website. I will have one table with a single primary key, and about 5 fields (id, view_order, user_id, image_file, date_uploaded).

I will have a second table that will count votes (id, image_id, time_voted)

Very simple.

Can MySQL easily handle a database where the first table may have 1-2 billion rows, and the second table, potentially 100’s of billions of rows?

I don’t need to do any searching, just simple counting of votes, and a lookup of an image based on the id of the image on the first table.

I’m not a database expert, so please forgive my terminology.

Thanks in advance,

Answer 1

On a 32-bit system, using an unsigned int you can have about 4 billion records. Use big int and/or a 64-bit system, it’s virtually unlimited. Facebook uses MySQL as their backend, the problem isn’t the number of records, it’s performance. MySQL can handle hundreds of millions of rows and have very good performance.