Because I plan to develop a rather large (for us anyway) data warehouse with PostgreSQL. I am looking for the right hardware that can handle queries on a database that might grow to over a 100 gigabytes. Right now our decision support system based on postgresql 8.1.3 stores retail sales information for about 4 four years back *but* only as weekly summaries. I want to build the system so it can handle daily sales transactions also. You can imagine how many more records this will involve so I am looking for hardware that can give me the performance I need to make this project useable. In other words parsing and loading the daily transaction logs for our stores is likely to take huge amounts of effort. I need a machine that can complete the task in a reasonable amount of time. As people start to query the database to find sales related reports and information I need to make sure the queries will run reasonably fast for them. I have already hand optimized all of my queries on the current system. But currently I only have weekly sales summaries. Other divisions in our company have done a similar project using MS SQL Server on SMP hardware far outclassing the database server I currently use and they report heavy loads on the server with less than ideal query run times. I am sure I can do my part to optimize the queries once I start this project but there is only so much you can do. At some point you just need more powerful hardware. This is where I am at right now. Apart from that since I will only get this one chance to buy a new server for data processing I need to make sure that I buy something that can grow over time as our needs change. I don't want to buy a server only to find out later that it cannot meet our needs with future database projects. I have to balance a limited budget, room for future performance growth, and current system requirements. Trust me it isn't easy. Juan -----Original Message----- From: Josh Berkus [mailto:josh@xxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 2:57 AM To: pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Cc: Juan Casero (FL FLC); Luke Lonergan Subject: Re: [PERFORM] Sun Fire T2000 and PostgreSQL 8.1.3 Juan, > Ok that is beginning to become clear to me. Now I need to determine > if this server is worth the investment for us. Maybe it is not a > speed daemon but to be honest the licensing costs of an SMP aware > RDBMS is outside our budget. You still haven't explained why you want multi-threaded queries. This is sounding like keeping up with the Joneses. -- Josh Berkus Aglio Database Solutions San Francisco
