How fast is MySQL with large tables?

How fast is MySQL when it comes to selecting, inserting or updating a table with millions of records, say over 3 million?

Thanks.

There is a benchmark result included in the mySQL manual. Reading 2000000 rows by index is 367 second on a NT machine. Didn't say what configuration for the computer, though.

I saw that benchmark right after I posted my question. I wonder if anyone has a first hand experience with it.

Do you know how it stacks against Oracle?

Thanks

I'm a long time Oracle person fairly new to MySQL but my subjective opinion is that MySQL is a lot faster than Oracle. The main reason for this is that Oracle is considerably bloated, and hence slowed, by all the inbuilt referential integrity, rollbacks, database procedures etc.

I've got a 1.7 million row MySQL table and a query on the primary key column takes about 0.25 seconds.

As always, with either database, indexing (or not) is the key to performance.