Robert L Cochran wrote:
1. My wife, on her 32 bit Intel laptop, running Microsoft Access, finds her system slowed down to a crawl whenever she works with one table that has 109,000 rows. This is just the beginning of the huge tables she creates. She has a bunch of others.
I moved this table to my Athlon 64 machine and converted it to the Linux x86_64 version of MySQL version 4.1.7. Then I queried the database using a PHP script to "select distinct" from 3 different columns and stuff the result sets into HTML select tags so that the client can pick valid column values for those columns. 3 queries, 109,000 rows...and they executed so fast the web page seems to come up instantly.
I plan to try this same query with SQLite as soon as I have time.
I think that in this case you'll find that the biggest speed advantage was in switching from MS-Access to MySQL. MySQL is very fast, and Access is very much not fast. If you want to really help your wife get a speed up, install MySQL on her laptop and give her the MySQL GUI client. Likewise, she could do very well with SQLite. I've been very impressed with SQLite compared with other disk-based databases on Windows and I86 hardware. It's also highly likely that you were running on faster hardware, as others have mentioned.
Clay Dowling
