Daniel,
>From what I've researched, the concepts and practices seem to fall
> under one of two abstract categorizations: fail-over (ok...
> high-availability), and parallel execution (high-performance... sure).
> While some consider the implementation of only one of these to qualify
> a cluster, others seem to demand that a "true" cluster must
> implement both.
If you want to get a high degree of parallelism, 10s or 100s of machines are required. At that size, you must have
faulttolerance to make the ystem usable.
> What I'm really after is a DB setup that does fail-over and parallel
> execution. Your setup sounds like it would gracefully handle the
> former, but cannot achieve the latter. Perhaps I'm simply asking too
> much of a free software setup.
We've spent the last 3 years developing a parallel database that does both and I can tell you that it takes a huge
developmenteffort to get it right for the general audience. Bizgres MPP is capable of handling ANSI SQL, is ACID
compliantand scales to tens of terabytes, but it's not free (sorry about that). It is tons cheaper than Oracle or
Teradatathough, and it's based on Postgres.
- Luke