Clusters

Hello,

I have a question regarding clusters. What with all
the hoop-la about Oracle RAC, the question of
clustering PostgreSQL has come up at work.

Now, I know that only one system can actually update
the database, and in a active/passive failover
situation that is ok. But! If I have lots and lots of
READS from the DB, can I cluster many low end systems
together behind an SLB? Assume that all systems have a
qlogic card, and are attached to a SAN, and that the
SAN holds the data. Can PostgreSQL be configured to
read from the SAN? Does each system have to initialize
the DB?

I think this could greatly improve the perfomance from
a application appearance, but, so far I have only seen
documentation about Oracle RAC, DB2, and MySQL using
some sort of cluster software, be it, kimberlite, Red
Hat Cluster Manager, or Vertias Cluster Server.

PostgreSQL seems to be our DB of choice, and I just
want to have a scalable solution via clustering for
it. No replication. Thanks for any thoughts!

-James

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James Kelty
11742 NW Valley Vista Rd.
Hillsboro, OR 97124
Cell: 541.621.5832
j_kelty(at)yahoo(dot)com

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