I strongly disagree with that. If you have enough information and you know what you are doing, you don't need to make errors.

Aye, but we are also far from working in a static enviroment.

Just you wait until we get some Joins vs. Sub-query threads here :D

That still can all be calculated and designed if you know what you are doing. That is not an excuse. Just make a study of how MySQL optimizer make it's choices, then see what indexes are available, what the distribution of values is among the columns that you are using for join/where/order, the number of rows in each table, the average length of the data in these columns, etc.. You can predict pretty good if somehting is optimized or not.

Wht about the idea of having a database that's always open?

I think that's what persistent connections are all about, but I don't know more about it...

I don't recommend persistent connections because it'll kill your server... it did it to mine!

- Sid

As I said, I don't know much about this feature, but I'm sure it depends on your needs and your server setup if this is an option for you.

I personally don't use p-connect, but some people swear by them. Again, depends on the how busy your site is, and your hardware. With enough hardware, p-connect will speed up your site a bit. But if you want to limit connections, switch it off.