On Thu, 16 Jan 2003, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote: > Due to the fact that we are growing out of our current system > (PostgreSQL on PCs) we are looking for ways to expand and one of the > suggestions has been to toss PostgreSQL in favour of Oracle with > Remote Access Cluster (RAC) software. The theory is that you can just > plug machines into the cluster if the database appears to be straining > and they automagically take over some of the load. > ... > My idea is to create a new middleware layer that allows me to split > things up based on various criteria without changing my application.
It's a basic principle of clustering that doing it in an application- aware way will always be more efficient than trying to hide it from the application. If you've not read it already, I strongly suggest reading _In Search of Clusters_ by Gregory F. Pfister. > And finally, if you had your dream machine to run on, what would it > be? We are also looking outside of PC hardware but we are concerned > about not having access to that nice, cheap, generic hardware for when > we need to grow again or for redundant backup. If you can manage to stick with PC hardware, you are going to save a *lot* of money. If you're considering buying a reasonably well loaded Sun E6000 or similar, it's well worth spending twenty or thirty thousand dollars on a big PC system and spending some time to see if that will do the trick before you shell out a couple hundred thousand for the Sun. As for how well postgres uses multiple CPUs: so long as you've got lots of connections with the load distributed among them, it's dependent on the OS, postgres. If the OS can handle the scheduling (which, last I checked, Linux couldn't, at least not without patches), eight or sixteen CPUs will be fine. cjs -- Curt Sampson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
