Eric Bergen wrote:
I think most of the focus on cloud computing is based around raw
processing power. They forget that all that data needs to be stored
somewhere at some point. I think the challenge for drizzle workloads
will be finding the correct balance of cpu, memory, i/o latency and
power consumption. Most of these cloud computing discussions forget
all about i/o latency. We can't.
May I suggest that it's time to re-examine your assumptions. From the
beginning of time (i.e. ~1970), database systems were things that ran on
single computers, sitting between the disk and the database client.
Since then processors have increased over a thousandfold in power,
memory has gone from a megabyte or two to 8 gigabytes, LANs to a
gigabit, and disks almost almost four times faster than they used to be.
Think network centric. Sun didn't get much right, but "the network is
the computer" was dead-on. The cost to fetch something from another
system is a small fraction of the cost to get something from disk. If
you're concerned about latency -- and you should be -- you want to pick
something off the network, not off a disk.
The design center should be an elastic set of expendable computers, not
a single computer. It is also cheaper to add another computer than to
make an existing one faster (as if that were even possible without
taking it down and replacing it). This requires a change in thinking
and a corresponding change in architectures.
I know the inherited code base needs vast amounts of work to be
maintainable, but wouldn't it make a lot of sense to think about
alternative architectures while that process continues? For example,
would Oracle RAC is a suitable model? If so, what might drizzle be
doing differently now to accommodate that later? What are the
requirements, goals, trade-offs, and non-goals?
Justing think about the number of network transfers you can while
waiting for the silly disk to turn and the arm to move should stimulate
the imagination...
(No, SSDs are the answer. They raise, but don't eliminate, the bar.)
--
Jim Starkey
President, NimbusDB, Inc.
978 526-1376
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