Re: Portable Postgres?

On Sep 13, 2006, at 6:25 PM, Brian Ghidinelli wrote:

>
> Steve Atkins wrote:
>> I don't know what the current lifetime of flash is, but I suspect
>> that putting data (as opposed to OS or binaries) on it might be
>> painful, both in terms of write speed and the flash drive dying.
>> You could rely on copying the data onto the host PC before using
>> it, or something, but it
>
> Good points. In my case, I'm planning to use an ipod which has a
> hard drive (I think?)

Yeah, the standard ipod has a small hard drive, so that should work.

> so this should be less of an issue (but clearly we're not going to
> be raising the benchmarks on any kind of performance metric).
> Interesting idea on the mini hitatchi drives. How long is it until
> we have "computer on a stamp" that we just need to carry with us
> and plug into a "host"?

That? It already exists. http://www.projectblackdog.com/
product.html . Flash, though, so not really useful for what you need.

>
>> usable than trying to get it on flash. You could even load a
>> vmware appliance onto it and have a fair bit of your full development
>
> Can VMWare be run without being "installed" in the host computer?

I think a pre-built vmplayer can be run from a USB drive, though I
don't know how networking would work. It'd be easy enough to try. The
other option would be a bootable USB drive. IIRC Ubuntu is selling
one with Linux preloaded onto it.

A vmplayer image with a random minilinux installation and current
postgresql would be very neat. If it created a ramdisk and copied the
data area into that (so it'd run from a CD or a thumb drive) it'd be
even neater.

Cheers,
Steve