SQL Server or mySQL?

Originally Posted by GMMorris Just out of interest - how powerful is your server? It would probably need some big guns for that amout of processing, no?

Dell 1850 Series Server
Dual 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon Processors (800 mhz FSB, 1 MB Cache)
73 GB 10,000 RPM SCSI Hard Drive
2 GB Registered ECC DDR SDRAM

It is powerful, but definitely not as high end as it could be.

Originally Posted by Aphex Your site is using a dedicated server though, correct? Most sites are using MySQL for small personal sites on virtual or shared servers. So, MySQL isn't going to seem all that fast at times.

Yes.

Also, I just checked and we are averaging 1,341.46 queries per minute now and our average load throughout the day has been 0.04. The average for the queries is being calculated since Sep 29, 2005 at 07:49 PM.

One more thing, as with any RDBMS, a huge factor is query optimization. This can make a much bigger difference than many people realize.

Even if you are on a shared server, PhpMyAdmin offers a few really good tools to help you with optimizing your queries too.

Not as many as Oracle has...
again- I'm not pushing Oracle on you, I'm just pointing out facts...

Originally Posted by GMMorris Not as many as Oracle has... again- I'm not pushing Oracle on you, I'm just pointing out facts...

Is this in reference to the tools available or the amount of optimization that you can achieve?

yea

Originally Posted by Alexa Too I have a friend who is a SQL Server DB guy. I also know that mySQL is popular and free. Which way should I go? Performance doesn't seem to be too big of a concern for some of the small ideas I have. Toodles, Alexa

I don't really think Oracle would be appropriate in this case.

I'd just use MySQL - it works and performs just fine.