When using Mysql- how do you change system values like- ft_min_word_len? I am trying to build a search but I want the search to allow words less than four letters- which is the default.

I have a 115 MB mySQL database on one of my osCommerce powered stores. The store has around 47-000 products in it. I have cached just about query I can for this store. On every page that displays a product price there are two queries that I cannot cache. It can take anywhere from 0.2 seconds to 2 seconds to run each of them. It takes about 3 seconds on average to load each page (plus download time).

I currently have this store on a vps with 256 MBs of RAM and 1% CPU time from eight 3.2 GHz Xeon cores.

Is there something I can do in the database to speed up the query times? Will upgrading to a 512 MB or 1024 MB VPS with 2% or 4% cpu time make much of a difference?

How to add php and database to a website?
i am making a website and i am in the middle of constructing it -but i want to know how to put a navigation bar
for example: like a comment button that you click and you can leave a comment!
can anyone give me a website or a code?
please help
p.s. someone told me that If I want to put comments on my site i would need php and database like mysql to store comments. but i dont know how to get this and can anyone show me how to make it or is there a website that i can get it for FREE?
thanks

So at the bottom of the page it will say:

Query Execution Time: xxxx ms.
anyone?

The question is a bit confusing- so a little background...

On my website I have a table of paper types whose data mostly consists of numerical indexes into several other tables. One field- for example- is color. When I do a query into the paper table- I can sort by the ID of the color- but the color names in the color table aren t in any order in reference to their IDs. What I really need is some way to sort the results of my query by the name of the color- not by the ID. Follow?

In other words- sorting by ID groups all papers with the same color together- but the order of the groups is haphazard. I want the result set to be alphabetized by color NAME- which is a field available in the color table. Can I do that?

Hi- I m getting started with PHP- and I read that I should download Apache- PHP- and MySQL. I know what MySQL and PHP are- but I need to know what Apache is/does. It said it s a web server- but I don t know what that means. Any info on this or anything else I need to know for programming in PHP is greatly appreciated. Thanks!