Department of Academic Information Systems

The Department of Academic Information Systems (AIS) at the University of Southern Denmark (http://www.sdu.dk/), uses MySQL extensively to provide RDBMS support to the faculties and administrative centers.

"We started out having our web services running on Macintosh servers with WebStar and FileMake Pro", says Senior Analyst Sven Meiborg Sørensen (MSc), "but it soon turned out that they simply could not handle the load".

Today, web services are running on a LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) setup, with one of two Compaq Proliant ML530 dual-Pentium III servers dedicated for Apache and PHP, the other for MySQL. "Among other things, MySQL is responsible for checking authentication on the web server." says Sørensen, "We do not have the exact statistics, but we do know that on an average day, we have more than 10 000 visitors to our sites and MySQL handles 1.5 queries per second. The peak load is of course many times higher".

"AIS wanted to move away from using FileMaker, so we started to look around for other solutions. Our major requirements were that the new database should be SQL compliant, easy to install and maintain. At the same time, we wished to move to the Linux platform for better use of Apache and PHP," says Sørensen.

Talks with colleagues and some litterature studies quickly narrowed the search down on MySQL. "We considered using Postgress for a while, but the sheer amount of documentation available on MySQL on-line, and not least Paul DuBois' very good book [MySQL, ed.], was the deciding factor". Experience with MySQL has not lessened Sørensen's enthusiasm: "MySQL is very capable and the number of features, while not as extensive as other products, are certainly enough to enable us in producing advanced solutions for our customers."

The AIS department continues to develop applications using MySQL - including products like local news services, calendars, directories and the university bookstore.

"The bookstore catalogue is updated once a week. The FileMaker Pro base with the 12000 titles contained about 15 fields for each title, and a few of the fields were computed values, e.g. a search field containing concatened author and title for the book. It took a full 2 hours to read a textfile dump of the catalogue into a new empty copy of the database each week - and during this, the webserver was totally blocked," says Sørensen. "When we moved the on-line bookstore to our new LAMP server, the total time for reading a complete text dump of all 12000 titles into a MySQL table was reduced to 20 seconds, including time for a PHP script to compute values for those fields that used to be FileMaker Pro computed fields. Even considering the difference in raw power between a 225 MHz iMac and a dual 800 MHz Pentium, a speed increase from 2 hours to 20 seconds is quite impressive. And the perceived speed of the on-line bookstore as experienced by the end users also increased dramatically, of course."

Sørensen is also very glad of the MySQL AB support. "We are very happy with the MySQL support, and have gotten good help in discussing the issues we raise with the MySQL developers. At one time, I submitted a technical question to MySQL AB support and a very satisfying answer came back to me within a short time: The error I reported actually turned out to be in the MySQL module of PHP and was triggered when choosing a new character set in MySQL, but your supporters nevertheless provided me with a patch to PHP!"