It's complex issue to discuss. As your platform is MySQL then I think that will be use on the web for different type transaction. Databases have a wide variety of uses and there are different requirements for online transaction processing (OLTP), online analytical processing (OLAP), and online complex processing (OLCP). Understanding these differences is important in selecting an appropriate architecture and DBMS, designing databases, and choosing an API. OLTP, OLCP, and OLAP databases each answer different questions. For example, to find orders for greater than 1,000 widgets you can use an OLTP query against an operational data store that contains current information. Amazon.com uses SQL queries against OLTP databases. OLTP programs place a premium on short-lived queries to support many concurrent database users. Transactions typically involve SQL tables containing rows of numbers and characters. If you want to find a picture containing a sunset image you can use an OLCP query against a database containing images. OLCP applications use databases that contain more complex types, such as audio, images, video, text, and spatial data. Finally, to get a list of the top-ten selling books in California for each month in the period 1995-1997, you can use an OLAP query against a multidimensional data source containing historical information. OLAP involves decision support queries against multidimensional data sets. OLAP programs typically sustain few users, doing long-running queries.
If we think from a view of access database in the back end and VB at the front. I have seen programmer to connect with database everytime they wanted to process any transaction. It costs memory and also larger process execution by the processor. So, now a days, programmer use a persistence connection at the begining of the application and kills it at the time of application termination. So, it saves memory and excess process. This is another scenario from stand-alone application view.
I hope more people will be able pour different technical information.
-DK.
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