I developed a site nearly 2 years (PHP, JAVA), but I am a new SEOer. My database has almost 1M articles. I have some questions I need help with: Is it as a good idea to create static pages from all the articles? Are more pages in the one site better for SEO? If I created each article into a static page, that could be many GBs. How do I let the search engine crawler collect my database?  
Are more pages in one site better for SEO?
seo
It doesn't matter where your pages come from (e.g. database / static).You just have to make sure that all your pages can be accessed by following links on your site (this is how search engines crawl your site).Either by adding the url's to a menu (not really the way to go with 1M pages :-) ) or by links at some other place on your site.To 'help' search engines index your pages you could add an HTML sitemap (basically a page with your most important links on it) and/or an XML sitemap.An XML sitemap will contain the links to the pages in a specific format.You should save the file sitemap.xml in the root of your website.Example of contents of sitemap.xml:<?xml version=1.0 encoding=UTF-8?><urlset xmlns=http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9><url><loc>http://www.example.com/</loc><lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod><changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.8</priority></url><url><loc>http://www.example.com/page</loc><lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod><changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.8</priority></url><url><loc>http://www.example.com/anotherpage</loc><lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod><changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.8</priority></url></urlset>