Tom Lane wrote:
"Alexander Staubo" <alex@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
On 6/16/07, Tom Allison <tom@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It might make an interesting project, but I would be really depressed
if I had to go buy an NVidia card instead of investing in more RAM to
optimize my performance! <g>
Why does it matter what kind of hardware you can (not "have to") buy
to give your database a performance boost? With a GPU, you would have
one more component that you could upgrade to improve performance;
that's more possibilities, not less. I only see a problem with a
database that would *require* a GPU to achieve adequate performance,
or to function at all, but that's not what this thread is about.
Too often, arguments of this sort disregard the opportunity costs of
development going in one direction vs another. If we make any
significant effort to make Postgres use a GPU, that's development effort
spent on that rather than some other optimization; and more effort,
ongoing indefinitely, to maintain that code; and perhaps the code
will preclude other possible optimizations or features because of
assumptions wired into it. So you can't just claim that using a GPU
might be interesting; you have to persuade people that it's more
interesting than other places where we could spend our
performance-improvement efforts.
You have a good point.
I don't know enough about how/what people use databases for in general to know
what would be a good thing to work on. I'm still trying to find out the
particulars of postgresql, which are always sexy.
I'm also trying to fill in the gaps between what I already know in Oracle and
how to implement something similar in postgresq. But I probably don't know
enough about Oracle to do much there either.
I'm a believer in strong fundamentals over glamour.
