3,000,000 rows of data and one tired soul..

Hey all,

I'm a newbie to the world of all things 'databased'. Before you all groan and run, let me say that I've been hacking away a bit and answered most of the stupid questions myself. (I might have a few left in me!)

A friend of mine who knows even less about databases was trying to get 3,000,000 parts listed in one table, merged with prices from another table. The end goal of this was to export this 'merged' list into a tab-delimited format.

Well so make this story shorter, here's what I dod for him. (Probably the worst way to do it, of course)

I wrote a PHP app to read data from both tables where part #'s matched and inserted the combined records into a new database.

I used Access97 for this task(at his request), and it took about 4 hours to run through all of the records on a dual-cpu 450Mhz NT box.

YIKES!

Would My-SQL have handled this any faster? Is this totally the wrong way to accomplish this goal?

Now SELECT statements take forever in Access to bring up the correct record(s). How do the BIG BOYS search that many fields quickly?


Thanks for any help,
Todd aka 'sleepy'

Yes, it would have been much faster using a true SQL server. Access is not designed to handle that many records.