Andrew, I'd say that commodity systems are the fastest with postgres - many have seen big slowdowns with high end servers. 'Several orders of magnitude' is not possible by just changing the HW, you've got a SW problem to solve first. We have done 100+ times faster than both Postgres and popular (even gridded) commercial DBMS using an intrinsically parallel SW approach.
If the objective is OLAP / DSS there's no substitute for a parallel DB that does query and load / transform using all the CPUs and IO channels simultaneously. This role is best met from a value standpoint by clustering commodity systems. For OLTP, we need better SMP and DML algorithmic optimizations for concurrency, at which point big SMP machines work. Right now you can buy a 32 CPU commodity (opteron) machine from SUN (X4600) for about $60K loaded. WRT hosting, we've done a bit of it on GPDB systems, but we're not making it a focus area. Instead, we do subscription pricing by the amount of data used and recommend / help get systems set up. - Luke Msg is shrt cuz m on ma treo -----Original Message----- From: Andrew Hammond [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2007 03:49 PM Eastern Standard Time To: Niklas Saers Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; pgsql-performance@postgresql.org Subject: Re: [PERFORM] [pgsql-jobs] Looking for database hosting Nik, you may be underestimating just how much performance can be obtained from a single database server. For example, an IBM p595 server connected to an array of ds8300 storage devices could reasonably be expected to provide several orders of magnitude more performance when compared to commodity hardware. In commodity space (albeit, just barely), a 16 core opteron running (the admittedly yet-to-be-released) FreeBSD 7, and a suitably provisioned SAN should also enormously outperform a beige-box solution, and at a fraction of the cost. If it's performance you care about then the pgsql-performance list (which I have cc'd) is the place to talk about it. I realize this doesn't address your desire to get out of database server administration. I am not aware of any company which provides database hosting, further I'm not entirely convinced that's a viable business solution. The technical issues (security, latency and reliability are the ones that immediately come to mind) associated with a hosted database server solution suggest to me that this would not be economically viable. The business issues around out-sourcing a critical, if not central component of your architecture seem, at least to me, to be insurmountable. Andrew On 8/19/07, Niklas Saers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hi, > the company I'm doing work for is expecting a 20 times increase in > data and seeks a 10 times increase in performance. Having pushed our > database server to the limit daily for the past few months we have > decided we'd prefer to be database users rather than database server > admins. :-) > > Are you or can you recommend a database hosting company that is good > for clients that require more power than what a single database > server can offer? > > Cheers > > Nik > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- > TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to > choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not > match >
