I agree with Emmanuel, and let me add:

· While PostGIS is excellent, quite a lot can be done with MySQL’s spatial extensions. I don’t swear over it, but the complexity of porting the app needs to be weighed against the limitations (also known as the “how many ppl would need it”).

· If you have a big site, you can always offload your data to your DB of choice. To me that is part of the “a factory installation won’t cut it”

· Not sure how the NoSQL option will.

· I do not have info on slow queries with me, but I’m sure code could be tightened. While I can’t point to examples, I do recall this from looking at several query-logs in MySQL.

Last, if anyone is interested in testing this, I would love to stay in touch.

Cheers,

Pablo

From: Emmanuel Kala [mailto:emkala@...]
Sent: Monday, July 16, 2012 14:50
To: developers@...
Subject: Re: [ushahidi developers] PHP/MySQL

Some notes:

Scale is a function of design
MySQL scales quite well...when you know what you're doing but it's not very inspiring for geo-spatial work. PostgreSQL (+PostGIS) has clearly become the preferred choice for such.
For high traffic deployments, a factory installation won't cut it - some load balancing, caching, DB tuning etc work has to be done in addition to exorcising ghosts that are always inherent in the machine
The NoSQL options, e.g. Redis, are pretty good for caching (Reddit and big xxx sites)
Profiling code has provided great insights on what sections of the application are yielding beastly load times

Thanks.

On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 10:59 PM, João Peixoto <joao.mpfp@...> wrote:

Hello all,

First post here, not really an Ushahidi developer yet, for the moment the NGO I work with has a couple projects that use it and since we love it, we're starting customization to meet our needs (which differ a bit from the typical Crwodmap sites - it's a biking support site).

On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 4:51 PM, David Kobia <david@...> wrote:

[...]

An option might be to ensure that database interaction is abstracted
enough that it doesn't matter what the underlying database is... and
this is something that might be worth looking into.

I'd love to see some DB abstraction on Ushahidi. If possible, have a "quick and dirty" approach using mysql that allows a quick deployment, but as a site scales up and requires further optimizations, allow better back-ends for efficiency.

My 2 cents!

Kind Regards,

Emmanuel Kala

Skype: emmanuel.kala

Judgement comes from experience, experience comes from poor judgement