On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 06:02:17PM -0700, mlartz@xxxxxxxxx wrote: > 1) How anal should I be about my hardware setup? I have about 15 300GB > 10K RPM SCSI drives, 4 of which I can directly attach to the server and > the rest one the FC array. Should I just put the OS and transaction > logs on the direct attached storage and and then RAID10 the rest of > them and be done, or would I significantly benefit from separating out > the indexes and partitioning across tablespaces across drives? Would > RAID5 across 10+ drives yield acceptable performance numbers? My experience is more OLTP than OLAP, but for a warehouse envirenment RAID5 can be a good solution since there's typically not a lot of updating going on. I've yet to see much gain from moving pg_xlog onto it's own seperate set of drives; there's usually not enough traffic from the OS to justify it. But it is possible that you could end up generating enough WAL traffic that pg_xlog would become a performance limiter on only 2 drives, though I suspect you'd have to have over 20-30 drives for data before that happened. > 3) I've currently installed RHEL4 AS for my OS, which I am very > comfortable with. I was going to go with EXT3 on everything (noatime) > ... sound good? There's a data=writeback option for ext3 that can make a big performance difference. > 2) Assuming that my data is roughly evenly distributed among IP > addresses, I figured that a naive partitioning based on the first octet See my other reply... > 3) I guess I don't quite understand Bizgres. At the moment, it seems > to be just a development beta of Postgres ... is this true? I realize > that the focus is on BI/ETL stuff, but the current improvements seem to > benefit Postgres as a whole. Is there currently or can you imagine a > case where a feature in Bizgres won't get integrated into Postgres? > How significant is the fork between Bizgres and Postgres? I've also > considered taking a look at Bizgres MPP. I know that its the wrong > forum, but any comments? You'd probably be better off asking on a bizgres list... > 4) Not to start any sort of flame war, but my company has an Oracle > license and there are a bunch of people wanting me to go that way. > I've been doing just fine with Postgres at the moment and am quite > comfortable with it, but am being pressured to go with our Oracle > license. Cost (and prejudices) aside, do you think it would be wise to > go with Oracle to begin with, considering the size of the database that > I'm planning? There's certainly people out there running multi-terrabyte databases on PostgreSQL. Unless there's a sound technical reason to switch, I'd stick with PostgreSQL, especially because migrating to Oracle from PostgreSQL is fairly easy. -- Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant jnasby@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117 vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf cell: 512-569-9461
