DBases in very large RAMDisks

[Eugene Leitl]

In my current application, I have a purely static ~700 MBytes dbase,
indices and all. It appeared to me, that even without partitioning across
machines, this would fit into a 1 GByte machine's RAMDisk (much cheaper
and noticeably faster than a solid-state disk, I would imagine), and offer
much better reponse times without changing a single line of code. A single
machine could thus serve one or two orders of magnitude more queries, or
far more complex (and hence forbiddingly expensive) queries.

I'm sure somebody here has experiences with such a setup, are there any
gotchas? What is the end-user speedup to expect? What is further speedup
typically, if one bypasses the filesystem entirely, and (the logical next
step) operates on stuff loaded directly into memory?

TIA,
-- Eugene