I run a website that uses a database, but not intensively, on a WAMP configuration. I currently use MS Access: We have a small database, < 4MB max, that can be downloaded for easy backup and emailed to organization members for completing tasks in the MS Access software (like generating reports, etc.). However, it requires MS Office software and isn’t exactly standard use with PHP.
On the other hand, our host provides MySQL, which is typical with PHP, generally more powerful, has a greater availability of software and support, but backup can be a little messier.
But, MySQL is not hosted on the local host. So, I copied the information to MySQL, and made a copy of the site using the MySQL database. I proceeded to run some benchmarks, and surprisingly, MS Access was faster, marginally.
I am not sure which is the best direction to take at this point. Hoping the community can give some pros and cons that I haven’t though about.
Since Access is way simpler, it’s not surprising that rough benchmarking reveals it’s faster. The difference comes when you have to deal with concurrent sessions and large data sets. Desktop apps are normally used by a single process at a time but in web applications concurrent queries are the norm.
Said that, if you’ve been using Access for a while and you didn’t find issues, I don’t think that switching to MySQL is going to make any difference regarding performance. I’d think about other considerations:
BTW, MySQL backups can be automated with a simple command line script, it should not be messy at all.