What is the SQL choice under “search engine language” all about?
Regardless of the language you select for your search engine (javascript, PERL, or PHP), the search will be performed sequentially using what is called a flat file. That is, each record of the database is examined, one at a time, in order to determine if it matches the search parameters that the user specified. That means that if you double the number of records in your database, you will double the amount of time required to perform the search. Eventually you will reach a point where the time required to perform the search is unacceptable to the users. (See question 412 for how many records can be searched in a reasonable amount of time.) For very large databases, such a sequential search is unacceptable. An alternative is to use a relational database such as mySQL. You do that by selecting SQL as the search-engine language. The search engine will be written in PHP (same as if you chose PHP as the language) but in this case the search engine will make calls into an SQL database rather
