DBases in very large RAMDisks

[alvin]

Sergiusz Jarczyk wrote:
> 
> Welcome
> This topic was discussed on many lists several times, and always ideas was
> crashed by one simple question - what happen when server crashes, or
> simply power goes down ? You can syncing data from memory with data on
> disks, but if you'll doing this in short period, overall performance won't
> be differ so much from "classical" implementations.

This is a generalization and as such misses many usefull places for
databases using ramdisk.
A little while ago I was working on a project where a database was being
used for session managment. The problem that we had was that the
database although very small was extreemly active. The database was kept
small by moving the information for closed sessions out to a session
history database. In this case the if the server crashed all the
sessions were lost and the database would get reinitalized in either
case. By using a ramdisk the system performance was greatly improved.

The issue is persistancy. If the database does not have to be persistant
then keeping it in a ramdisk can provide for a serious performance
improvment.


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