[Eikinskjaldi]

Originally Posted by mihai11

What if I will have 10000 stories and 10000 threads ? It will take a lot of memory to make a join of those 2 tables and most of the information will not be needed. The user only sees 10 stories per page, so I will fetch those 10 stories then for each story I will fire a query to get the thread information corresponding for that story.

I am assuming you have some kind of where clause to limit the join, so it is not an all - all query
Assuming there is some kind of index field that relates storeis to threads, then the number in each table is irrelevant, the index and join will ensure you only reference the needed rows. Doing it in two queries costs more in query overhead. As I said the first time around. Don't wave your hands and guess, use explain and find out the actual cost!

About "hotcopy": I am sorry, but I never heard of it. Is this going to boost my DB performance ?

The reason for using innodb is because my host configure it like that.

Without hotcopy you have to turn your server off to do a backup.