DBases in very large RAMDisks

[JParker at coinstar.com]

G'Day !

I believe M$ used the concept in some large internal SQL databases using SAP
around 5 years ago when I was contracting there.  I do not know the exact
details, or how successfully they were, but it was a much larger than the
database you are talking about.

cheers,
Jim Parker

Sailboat racing is not a matter of life and death ....  It is far more important
than that !!!


                                                                                                                                             
                    Eugene Leitl                                                                                                             
                    <Eugene.Leitl at lrz.uni-mu        To:     beowulf at beowulf.org                                                              
                    enchen.de>                      cc:                                                                                      
                    Sent by:                        Subject:     DBases in very large RAMDisks                                               
                    beowulf-admin at beowulf.or                                                                                                 
                    g                                                                                                                        
                                                                                                                                             
                                                                                                                                             
                    03/09/01 07:50 AM                                                                                                        
                                                                                                                                             
                                                                                                                                             




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


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