Some advice please

Hi,

Can somebody advise me on a project that we plan to undertake.

My company intends to build a web site with a huge database at the back end. That is, it is our intention to create a database that is capable of storing records for a huge number of site visitors; say, 30,000,000 people - but who really knows.

For each user/visitor we anticipate requiring no more than 10 information fields. The database then needs to be interactive with the web site's html pages. Meaning that people must be able to insert information from their browsers whilst others must then be able to retrieve the same info from dynamically created html pages.

As an example of the kind of thing I have in mind: Users from all over the world must be able to store information about themselves, but a surfer from Atlanta must be able to then come to our site and be able to discover from the database the average shoe-size of Londoners and the names of all those who take a size 11 shoe and live in Wembley. When he makes the enquiry from our web site concerning the shoe sizes he then gets a few pages created for him listing the individuals names and addresses. He also gets banner ads dynamically built into the pages according to his own user profile. Get it?

I have been advised that Oracle is probably the best db software to use because of the size of db required and because Oracle is robust enough for the job. My questions then, are these:

1. Which Oracle products would you recommend? Would it be Oracle 8i and Web DB?
2. Which OS platform is preferable? Is NT stable enough, will it cope? Or, must it me Unix or Linux?
3. For various reasons it may be that we ask a non-programmer to accomplish this task. That is, RTFM and get on with it. Is this feasible, or is it an impossible task for a mere mortal? I need to know this, since it may well be me who has to read the manuals and do the job.

Any advice would be very much appreciated. We have a large project on our hands and we want to be certain to start at the right place. It would be very helpful if replies could be e-mailed to me as well as sent to the group. Thanks.

Paul Received on Wed Jan 26 2000 - 10:43:25 CST