Database driven websites

Hey,
Right now my site has about 175 pages and they are all in .html format. I was thinking about switching to a database driven site so I need to convert the pages to .php in order for database to run. Would it be alright if I make my future pages in .php and after a while switch to a database program. Thanks a lot.

And also what database program is good for a website. I want something reliable and good. Thanks.

personally i feel a proper DB driven site should be built as a DB site from the ground up.. if you want to make the change i think its time for an overhaul! Its worth it down the line.

For the DB MySQL is free, cant go wrong with it. also depends on the scale of your site.

My website is pretty big and increasing as every day. With over 175 pages and serving more than 30,000 visitors I can't afford to take a risk.

There are three quite reliable open source (free) database systems out there that work with PHP:

1. MySQL is the most popular. It is quite reliable, although it is the most 'liteweight' in terms of features and ANSI-SQL compliance. At present it doesn't support stored procedures, triggers, and other features that are typical of the more enterprise-quality DBMSs, but it is fast and easy to work with.

2. PostgreSQL (my favorite) is probably the second most popular DBMS for PHP. It is a very capable DBMS. While it doesn't have the instant speed that MySQL has, it tends to scale up better for large, complex applications, and has an amazing list of added features and associated software libraries. So far, PostgreSQL has been mainly a Unix-oriented DBMS, but there is work being done on a native Windows version, which promises to run quite well. Betas are already available.

3. FireBird is gaining popularity every year, though. It is also firmly in the "enterprise" side of things, with full-featured relational capabilities, as well as stored procedures, triggers, constraints, etc... I don't know as much about Firebird's reliability, but check out the Firebird SQL forum here at Devshed.

Also, each of the above DBMS systems has some method of accomplishing online database replication/failover, or even clustering. (PostgreSQL has several choices, actually)

I would certainly recommend the change, but yeah, you would want to completely overhaul the site and get some good templates going to load data into the pages from the DB. With 175 pages, I would guess that they all follow a similar format?

**edit: Grammar > me