Re: Scalability (both vertical and horizontal)?

On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Duffey, Kevin wrote:

> We are looking for information regarding any capabilities of PostgreSQL
> in regards to scalability. Ideally we want to be able to scale in both
> directions. What sort of solutions are out there for either or both
> directions of scalability? Specifically, open-source solutions would be
> most in need, but commercial applications are fine as well.

The most important resource as regards vertical scalability is probably
the performance mailing list. I.e. Postgresql can already take advantage
of multiple processors and spare memory and fast I/O subsystems, but
things like 64 way Sun E10ks are not commonly tested with Postgresql, so
if you're the first guy on the block to buy one, you might find some
issues that need ironing out with that large of a piece of iron.

As for horizontal scaling, you could look at ERserver for that. Setup one
master writer and a bunch of slave boxes to handle the majority of the
queries. There's not been a bunch of work into horizontal scaling really,
with most of the clustering software for postgresql aiming at failover /
high availability, not massive parallelization of read and / or writes.