Often, web developers turned database designers begin their coding endeavors by picking up whatever snippets are printed in the O’reilly title at hand or whatever Google throws their way. Building a database-driven website is easy. Making it fast is not. A little attention to schema, indexes, query optimization, and benchmarking could give your app the performance boost it needs to reach greatness.

1. Benchmark to measure success
2. Get familiar with the EXPLAIN command
3. Know how the storage engines differ
4. Narrow, non-redundant indexes are better
5. Smaller data types are better
6. Fewer reads = faster results: Use the query cache for read intensive apps
7. Learn to use joins properly
8. Use calculated fields only when necessary
9. Increase memory

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This is a simple mysql connection class that I’ve been using. I follow Jay Pipes advice about lazy loading from this post.

Here are the files in text.

• includes/database.inc.php (txt)
• includes/db.php (txt)
• dbtest.php (txt)