I curretly have MySql for my blog site. But sometimes it seems a little slow, not sure if its just the site though. But whats the best database to use? would it even make a difference?
Performance wise there is not the greatest difference for a small site like a blog. When you are getting into having a farm of servers then the differences become more apparent For a sme type site it is normal to go with the natural partner for the programming language eg ASP & MS SQL, PHP & MySQL etc If the site is slow you would need to look at the programming of the blog to ensure the coding is efficient - unless there are frequent updates then cache the outputs - but probably most relevant is the load on the web server and sql server to see if it is slow simply because the server is straining under the load or the network is running near capacity.
100% it is a coding issue with the site or the speed of the line that the site is on. Also is this on a shared host? Possibly another big site is killing the resources & bandwidth of the machine. Small blogs and websites on a mysql db are fine. Perfect example I am running a 16K/unique per month roughly 75,000K/hits per month on a Mysql DB with some intense PHP coding. So benchmark from there. The site is extremely fast. Not tooting my own horn here but I did homebrew everything myself heh
Based on what you've mentioned, MySQL. MySQL is pretty decent, and unless you're willing to form out a nice chunk of change, there really isn't a better alternative. If queries are slow, make sure there's enough free ram, optimize the config file for both PHP and MySQL. Also, setup a cron job to stop/start (restart) the service ever 24 or 48 hours at midnight or something. That usually clears up my ram and keeps things running smooth. Would anyone disagree with that suggestion? I haven't ran into any issues with data loss or anything, yet.
Depends, if your getting a lot of traffic, Oracle is a dream, so is the price (sarcasm) However, MYSQL is perfect for the majority of sites. It's also down to programming. Make sure if your using mysql_connect (assuming your using PHP), you close the connection with mysql_close. I also recommend using mysql_pconnect over connect, as when you are recieving large amounts of traffic it's much more efficent. Also, make sure your using INDEXES and PRIMARY keys. These will give you a significant speed boost, but make sure you use them correctly. If this doesn't speed you up (it will if it hasnt already been done), then change host.
Not sure why quoting a single company you prove that a db technology is the best one? Plenty of massive organisations use MS SQL, Oracle, DB2 etc. Plus one of the very advantages of MySQL is it is open source and so there is no way to know how much of it has been rewritten for/ my Wiki