[ic] [ic]/[mv] Large Product tables

Mike Heins mikeh@minivend.com
Wed, 10 Jan 2001 17:26:16 -0500


Quoting John Foster (jfoster@augustmail.com):
> Barney Treadway wrote:
> > Again, thanks for the insight. I'm going to push ahead with this in some
> > manner and I'll endeavor to keep folks informed as to load issues and
> > workarounds for catalogs of this size. I'd appreciate any feedback or words
> > of warning/encouragement. :-)
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> I have run into many problems with large databases and IC. I HIGHLY
> recommend the MySQLman application from the below website. Depending on
> your system it may be tricky to setup but it will allow you to have an
> excellent tool for managing these larger databases. I also use WebMin in
> both site management and in DB management. Good Luck!

It is easy to shoot yourself in the foot with any application and a large
database. I know, I have done it many times. Interchange's admin UI is
optimized for DBs that are 50,000 records or less. If you have that many
records, you need SQL to use the IC admin tool with any success. Even
then, you have to make sure that proper indexing is done on all fields
that are selected/sorted on.

I would be very interested to hear of success stories with other shop/cart
builders and very large databases. I haven't heard of many; in fact,
more than a few Interchange users are refugees from some commercial
application that hit the wall at 20,000 products.

The Interchange application itself will not repeal the laws of physics,
but if used in a reasonable manner it is capable of working with very
large database tables. There are sites which have as many as a million
items, and at least one that has 500,000 and uses GDBM. They don't try and
run the item editor on that, though! And they use external import/export
programs and don't try to do auto-import and export.

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