MySQL: Is it safe to have a table with multiple millions of rows?

Question

I have a very complex search query to write that will touch many tables, have conditions and joins. For efficiency reasons, I am strongly considering creating a "cache table" where I would maybe once a day compute most of the work so that when a user wants to do a search, it would be faster.

However this cache table could easily have 10 to 50 million rows. Is this bad? Is this worth it? Will I gain in efficiency? What are things that I should keep an eye for?

We use InnoDB.

Answer 1

If your data can be pre-calculated and is static intra-day then why not?
After all, isn't this what a data warehouse does?

As for having up to 50 million rows, this is peanuts.

Answer 2

10-50 million is really not that big. However, the gain really depends on the structure of the table and the queries written against it.