Databases Software for Rapid Queries

Question

I'm writing a Comet application that has to keep track of each open connection to the server. I want to write an entry to the database for each connection, and I will have to search the database for the proper connections every time the application receives new data (often), which is why I don't want to start off on the wrong foot by choosing slow database software. Any suggestions for a database that favors rapid, small pieces of data (rather than occasional large pieces of data)?

Answer 1

• Hypersonic: http://hsqldb.org/
• MySQL (for webapps)

Answer 2

SQL Server 2008 has a FileStream data type that can be used for rapid, small pieces of data. McLaren Electronic Systems uses it to capture and analyze telemetry/sensor data from Formula One race cars.

Answer 3

I suggest rather using a server platform that allows the creation of persistent servers, that keep all such info in the memory. Thus all database access will be limited to writing (if you want to actually save any information permanently), which usually is signifficantly less in typical Comet-apps (such as chats/games).

Databases are not made to keep such data. Accessing a database directly always means composing query strings, often sending them to a db server (sometimes even over the network), db lookup, serialization of the results, sending back, deserialization and traversing the fetched results. There is no way this can be even nearly as fast as just retrieving a value from memory.

If you really want to stick with PHP, then I suggest you have a look at memcached and similar caching servers.

greetz
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