Is it OK if I have sth like 5000 terms on a website?

This suggestion might be controversial in a Drupal forum .. but for your application you might be better starting with an XML database to build and retain your searchable proverbs in XML .. searched by XQuery ..

http://exist.sourceforge.net/

However eXist runs on a Tomcat server (java) and not under Apache (PHP+MySQL).

That said you can get the best of both worlds by using Drupal as your front end CMS and then making REST calls to your back end eXist XML database.

In fact if you have control over your dedicated server you can run both Apache and Tomcat on the same physical server on different ports .. but don't expect any hosting companies to offer this hybrid.

Another strategy is to run two separate servers .. Drupal on one and eXist on another. Drupal would make REST queries to eXist.

So my suggestion is consider a hybrid. Play around with eXist to see if it is suitable then use Drupal 6.x as a front end content delivery system. Look at submitting XML to and from eXist using PHP5.

This XML editor is useful ..

http://xml-copy-editor.sourceforge.net

Thanks, D L

You mean the drupal database (MySQL) is not suitable for my purpose? I actually am not a programmer and what I said about a dedicated server was for the time the website has lots of users and there's load on the server.

2000 or 5000 records, or even 10x that, is not really a lot of data as far as mysql is concerned. i'd worry more about managing that data than how quick the database can query it -- the database can be tuned later if it turns out to be an issue.

i don't see a reason to consider xml for the quotes and whatnot -- if you go with all that data in a separate data store using an entirely different server platform, you'll need a second CMS to manage it, and you wouldn't be able to benefit from the things drupal can do, e.g. categorizing the quotes using taxonomy, allowing comments or ratings on them, listing them in blocks according to various criteria, etc. xml is good at hierarchally-structured data but what you're describing sounds like a flat table, with some metadata associated with each record. drupal/mysql are great at this sort of thing.

i just wrapped up a project using an xml cms and i have to say it was a *giant* pain in a variety of ways. this system required you to define the schema (data structure) before entering any data, and although you could change the schema later, those changes *wouldn't* be reflected in any already-created records. so, we really had to know exactly what we needed before we built anything. this of course lead to lots of false starts and do-overs. in contrast, drupal/cck allow the schema to be changed at any time (say, adding fields), and those changes apply to all records of that data type. it's pretty wonderful. and views is way way way better than the xpath/xslt stuff we had to use in this other system.

i wouldn't worry about the performance of the quotes part of the site affecting other parts of the site -- if you build it and see slowdowns, and find that things like caching, mysql tuning, etc. don't help, *then* you could think about splitting parts of the site onto separate servers.

Since the data entry does take time, and I don't want to redo it!

note that if you install the devel module, you can use it to create a bunch of dummy data for testing, before you take the time to enter the real data.

I have a site with over 100 thousand nodes and 40 thousand terms, around 1 million pv per month, runs on a dedicated box from Rackspace and never misses a beat.

We use memcache and other trickery for caching but thats about it, nothing really that special.