Re: PostgreSQL clustering VS MySQL clustering

Merlin Moncure wrote:
> ...You need to build a bigger, faster box with lots of storage...
> Clustering ...
> B: will cost you more, not less

Is this still true when you get to 5-way or 17-way systems?

My (somewhat outdated) impression is that up to about 4-way systems
they're price competitive; but beyond that, I thought multiple cheap
servers scales much more afordably than large servers. Certainly
at the point of a 129-CPU system I bet you're better off with a
network of cheap servers.

> A: a headache

Agreed if you mean clustering as-in making it look like one single
database to the end user. However in my experience a few years ago, if
you can partition the data in a way managed by the application, it'll
not only be less of a headache, but probably provide a more flexable
solution. Currently I'm working on a pretty big GIS database, that
we're looking to partition our data in a manner similar to the microsoft
whitepaper on scaling terraserver that can be found here:
http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?msr_tr_id=MSR-TR-2002-53

I think this paper is a very nice analysis of many aspects of
larger-server&SAN vs. application-partitioned-clusters, including
looking at cost, reliability, managability, etc. After reading that
paper, we started very seriously looking into application-level
partitioning.