On 5/19/07, Will Fould <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Here's the situation: We have a fully normalized relational database (mysql) now being accessed by a web application and to save a lot of complex joins each time we grab rows from the database, I currently load and cache a few simple hashes (1-10MB) in each apache processes with the corresponding lookup data
Are you certain this is saving you all that much, compared to just doing the joins? With proper indexes, joins are fast. It could be a win to do them yourself, but it depends greatly on how much of the data you end up displaying before the lookup tables change and have to be re-fetched.
Is anyone doing something similar? I'm wondering if implementing a BerkleyDB or another slave store on each web node with a tied hash (or something similar) is feasible and if not, what a better solution might be.
Well, first of all, I wouldn't feed a tied hash to my neighbor's dog. It's slower than method calls, and more confusing. There are lots of things you could do here, but it's not clear to me what it is that you don't like about your current method. Is it that when the database changes you have to do heavy queries from every child process? That also kills any sharing of the data. Do you have more than one server, or expect to soon? - Perrin
