I'm writing a cross-platform application in C++ (with wxWidgets lib), which currently references a server-side MySQL database which contains information (including target file name) of a very large number of files. Currently I am doing this by opening a direct SQL connection with each client (with thousands of users, this is not very efficient), but I've been told this is not good practice as it wastes way too much overhead. Can anyone point me to a good technology or way to handle this sort of task (lacking PHP knowledge unfortunately)?