Re: Hardware/OS recommendations for large databases (

James,

On 11/15/05 11:07 AM, "James Mello" <james(at)haydrian(dot)com> wrote:

> Unless there was a way to guarantee consistency, it would be hard at
> best to make this work. Convergence on large data sets across boxes is
> non-trivial, and diffing databases is difficult at best. Unless there
> was some form of automated way to ensure consistency, going 8 ways into
> separate boxes is *very* hard. I do suppose that if you have fancy
> storage (EMC, Hitachi) you could do BCV or Shadow copies. But in terms
> of commodity stuff, I'd have to agree with Merlin.

It¹s a matter of good software that handles the distribution / parallel
query optimization / distributed transactions and management features.
Combine that with a gigabit ethernet switch and it works ­ we routinely get
50x speedup over SMP on OLAP / Decision Support workloads.

Regards,

- Luke