Re: [PERFORM] Looking for database hosting

Andrew,

I'd say that commodity systems are the fastest with postgres - many have seen big slowdowns with high end servers. 'Several orders of magnitude' is not possible by just changing the HW, you've got a SW problem to solve first. We have done 100+ times faster than both Postgres and popular (even gridded) commercial DBMS using an intrinsically parallel SW approach.

If the objective is OLAP / DSS there's no substitute for a parallel DB that does query and load / transform using all the CPUs and IO channels simultaneously. This role is best met from a value standpoint by clustering commodity systems.

For OLTP, we need better SMP and DML algorithmic optimizations for concurrency, at which point big SMP machines work. Right now you can buy a 32 CPU commodity (opteron) machine from SUN (X4600) for about $60K loaded.

WRT hosting, we've done a bit of it on GPDB systems, but we're not making it a focus area. Instead, we do subscription pricing by the amount of data used and recommend / help get systems set up.

- Luke

Msg is shrt cuz m on ma treo

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Hammond [mailto:andrew(dot)george(dot)hammond(at)gmail(dot)com]
Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2007 03:49 PM Eastern Standard Time
To: Niklas Saers
Cc: pgsql-jobs(at)postgresql(dot)org; pgsql-performance(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: [PERFORM] [pgsql-jobs] Looking for database hosting

Nik, you may be underestimating just how much performance can be obtained
from a single database server. For example, an IBM p595 server connected to
an array of ds8300 storage devices could reasonably be expected to provide
several orders of magnitude more performance when compared to commodity
hardware. In commodity space (albeit, just barely), a 16 core opteron
running (the admittedly yet-to-be-released) FreeBSD 7, and a suitably
provisioned SAN should also enormously outperform a beige-box solution, and
at a fraction of the cost. If it's performance you care about then the
pgsql-performance list (which I have cc'd) is the place to talk about it.

I realize this doesn't address your desire to get out of database server
administration. I am not aware of any company which provides database
hosting, further I'm not entirely convinced that's a viable business
solution. The technical issues (security, latency and reliability are the
ones that immediately come to mind) associated with a hosted database server
solution suggest to me that this would not be economically viable. The
business issues around out-sourcing a critical, if not central component of
your architecture seem, at least to me, to be insurmountable.

Andrew

On 8/19/07, Niklas Saers <niklassaers(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
> the company I'm doing work for is expecting a 20 times increase in
> data and seeks a 10 times increase in performance. Having pushed our
> database server to the limit daily for the past few months we have
> decided we'd prefer to be database users rather than database server
> admins. :-)
>
> Are you or can you recommend a database hosting company that is good
> for clients that require more power than what a single database
> server can offer?
>
> Cheers
>
> Nik
>
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