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Starting as an ´amateur´ web directory, we managed to run our web pages and search function initially with one, later on with up to 7 MS Access databases. Every now and then it looked like our databases could not cope with the number of visitors. Not clear how many simultaneous visitors MS Access can take. In any case, when contacting our web hosting service, we were repeatedly told to upgrade and use MySQL or MS SQL database. However, it always looked like a rather big project we eventually would have to do, probably with help of some professionals.
MySQL, the `free` database, always looked like a mystery to us, and we had some serious misconceptions about it. Misconceptions partly present because of poor marketing and poor information (including on the MySQL.com website). Invariably MySQL seems to be presented together with PHP (as the webpage coding source). So much so that we taught ASP could not be used to access MySQL databases. Nothing is less true, and connecting to MySQL with ASP-language is really easy. When we found out about this, we finally considered upgrading our database(s).
A further mystery was, how can we create our database, and how does it look on our desktop? This issue is also poorly addressed on the MySQL.com website, and in various forums, and computer technology related sites. As far as we figured out now, an MySQL database somehow resides on a server, and it can be accessed, and data added etc. through software present on your desktop computer and/or regular website coding. This still is disappointing, we always found it particularly convenient we could simply download our MS Access database, and make rapid changes with simple copy and paste actions.
No such luck with MySQL.
Now the interesting part. We kind of considered spending about 3 months trying to figure out MySQL, doing all the coding etc. It so happens we did it in about 3 days (with a few items unresolved, and needing some more study).
We figured out it was necessary to download a variety of software from the MySQL site.
This included : MySQL Server 5.0 ; MySQL Migration Tool ; MySQL Query Browser ; MySQL Administrator. At present, we hardly know anything about the utility of all this software, we kind of think we need the server installed on our desktop, so as to be able to use the other utilities, although we may be wrong about this.
The breakthrough came when we figured out it was quite easy to convert a MS Access Database into a MySQL database. First we ´created´ an empty MySQL database on our server (simply by clicking a few items on our hosting service website). Then we gave our present MS Access Database the same name (this appeared necessary) and used the MySQL Migration Tool to convert the MS Access database on our desktop computer into a MySQL database on our server. Unexpectedly this was an incredibly easy procedure. It is not clear where our database on the server is physically, how big it is etc., but it is there and can be accessed.
The coding to connect to our new database was provided by our hosting company and just needed to be pasted in our webpages. We had to make a few trial and error changes on our web pages. Some changes were unexpected, but all problems could be resolved by asking some questions to Google. Very fearful of mishaps, we first made changes to one of our smaller websites. When everything went smoothly, we made the same changes at ThaiWebsites.com and basically within three days, we managed to make the upgrade. Now 95 percent or more of the whole site runs on MySQL without problems. We can add, edit and delete sites on the server at ease.
Now we plan to figure out what we can do further with all the software we have installed, this will probably be a long lasting experience. But it looks like we will be able to run our ASP pages with MySQL without having much knowledge about the whole thing anyway. Hopefully this report will give encouragement to a few people. The message is : the MySQL community does a poor job in communicating how to use its software. This actually is pitiful. If you have something useful, you have to do some effort to explain its possibilities to the wider community. In any case, try your luck, it does appear to be easier than expected.
Add-on :
After running for a few months without any real hiccups, the MySQL database at our hosting company became totally unaccessible. A hardware failure occurred and it took three full days to have normal function restores. So much so for upgrading to a higher level database. Fortunately, we still had our old MS Access database available, and made good use of it. So we were offline only for a few hours (time delay since the problem occurred overnight, so we were not aware of it earlier).
The message here is : whenever you read about 99.99 % guarantee to keep a working server, you have to take it with a grain of salt. Over the years we experienced episodes of a few hours or half a day with quite a few of the hosting services we used (we have many websites running). Probably a good estimate of being able to reliably online is somewhere between 99 and 99.75 %.
We also base this opinion on our experience with broken links. Our directory database contains more than 5,000 websites. When we run software every two months or so, we always find around 2 % broken links, including websites redirected to other content, or becoming a 'parked domain' with advertisements. However, there are always around 20-30 websites that are offline temporarily (they reappear when we check them again after a few hours, before deleting them from our databases). This means about 0,5% or about 1 in 200 websites are offline with server problems at any given time.
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