Wow, you give us too much credit out here. From your post we can't determine anything about what you plan to do (how is your data structured, how much data do you have, can it be indexed to speed up searching...).
Python and MySQL work together beautifully. ANY SQL database's performance is more about properly defining the tables and indexes where appropriate than about language uses to it. You can write compiled C (or any other language for that matter) that calls a poorly designed database that gets terrible performance. A well thought out database structure with good choices for indexes can give you outstanding performance when called from any language. Ultimately it comes down to building a SQL query and passing it to the SQL database and getting back results. Front end language isn't all that important (unless you must post-process the data in the program a lot). It is not uncommon to get 100x or 1000x speed increases due to adding proper indexes to tables or refactoring master-detail table relationships in any SQL database. You can't get that by changing languages or even purchasing faster hardware.
MySQL is particularly good when your read operations outnumber your writes. US Census Bureau uses MySQL because they have static data that gets read over and over (even though my understanding is that they have an Oracle site license). Databases that are transaction oriented (e.g. accounting, etc.) can sometimes benefit from the highly transactional nature of an Oracle or DB2 or Postgres. Later versions of MySQL have added transactions, but the support is IMHO a step behind the big guys in this area. Also, if you want to be highly scalable so as to provide for clustering, of database servers, etc. MySQL doesn't do that well in this area, YET.
I hope my random thoughts are helpful.
Larry Bates
sandy wrote:
Hi All,
I am a newbie to MySQL and Python. At the first place, I would like to know what are the general performance issues (if any) of using MySQL with Python.
By performance, I wanted to know how will the speed be, what is the memory overhead involved, etc during database specific operations (retrieval, update, insert, etc) when MySQL is used with Python.
Any solutions to overcome these issues (again, if any)?
Thanks and Regards, Sandeep
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