On Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 11:09:41AM -0400, kalin mintchev wrote:
> > I guess a lot of that depends what an acceptable query execution time for
> > you is.
>
> well... i don't really know. 30 secs maximum?! i've never worked with
> such huge tables. 3 - 5 million records is fine but i've never worked on a
> db with a table with 100 000 000 records.

I wouldn't worry about it. I have a table here with nearly a billion
rows, and it fetches based on the primary key in "0.00 sec".

> my calculation was mostly based on resources - like ram. like i mentioned
> earlier the .MYD and .MYI files together on the current one that i have -
> which has about 1.2 million records - are 90 mgb.
> are the .MYI files kept in ram or both .MYD and .MYI?

Neither of them are kept in RAM. You want a reasonable amount of
memory for buffers, query cacheing, etc, but you don't need to hold
any of the files in memory.

My main concern with large tables is disk space, especially if you're
ever going to want to do ALTER TABLE, when you will need enough free
space to hold the existing and new copies of the table on disk at the
same time.