(mysql.info) internal-use

 
 7.1.3 What We Have Used MySQL For
 ---------------------------------
 
 This section describes an early application for MySQL.
 
 During MySQL initial development, the features of MySQL were made to
 fit our largest customer, which handled data warehousing for a couple
 of the largest retailers in Sweden.
 
 From all stores, we got weekly summaries of all bonus card
 transactions, and were expected to provide useful information for the
 store owners to help them find how their advertising campaigns were
 affecting their own customers.
 
 The volume of data was quite huge (about seven million summary
 transactions per month), and we had data for 4-10 years that we needed
 to present to the users. We got weekly requests from our customers, who
 wanted instant access to new reports from this data.
 
 We solved this problem by storing all information per month in
 compressed `transaction tables.' We had a set of simple macros that
 generated summary tables grouped by different criteria (product group,
 customer id, store, and so on) from the tables in which the
 transactions were stored. The reports were Web pages that were
 dynamically generated by a small Perl script. This script parsed a Web
 page, executed the SQL statements in it, and inserted the results. We
 would have used PHP or `mod_perl' instead, but they were not available
 at the time.
 
 For graphical data, we wrote a simple tool in C that could process SQL
 query results and produce GIF images based on those results. This tool
 also was dynamically executed from the Perl script that parses the Web
 pages.
 
 In most cases, a new report could be created simply by copying an
 existing script and modifying the SQL query that it used. In some
 cases, we needed to add more columns to an existing summary table or
 generate a new one. This also was quite simple because we kept all
 transaction-storage tables on disk. (This amounted to about 50GB of
 transaction tables and 200GB of other customer data.)
 
 We also let our customers access the summary tables directly with ODBC
 so that the advanced users could experiment with the data themselves.
 
 This system worked well and we had no problems handling the data with
 quite modest Sun Ultra SPARCstation hardware (2x200MHz).  Eventually
 the system was migrated to Linux.
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