Re: Sun Fire T2000 and PostgreSQL 8.1.3

Because I plan to develop a rather large (for us anyway) data warehouse
with PostgreSQL.  I am looking for the right hardware that can handle
queries on a database that might grow to over a 100 gigabytes.  Right
now our decision support system based on postgresql 8.1.3 stores retail
sales information for about 4 four years back *but* only as weekly
summaries.  I want to build the system so it can handle daily sales
transactions also.  You can imagine how many more records this will
involve so I am looking for hardware that can give me the performance I
need to make this project useable.  In other words parsing and loading
the daily transaction logs for our stores is likely to take huge amounts
of effort.  I need a machine that can complete the task in a reasonable
amount of time.  As people start to query the database to find sales
related reports and information I need to make sure the queries will run
reasonably fast for them.  I have already hand optimized all of my
queries on the current system.  But currently I only have weekly sales
summaries.  Other divisions in our company have done a similar project
using MS SQL Server on SMP hardware far outclassing the database server
I currently use and they report heavy loads on the server with less than
ideal query run times.  I am sure I can do my part to optimize the
queries once I start this project but there is only so much you can do.
At some point you just need more powerful hardware.  This is where I am
at right now.  Apart from that since I will only get this one chance to
buy a new server for data processing I need to make sure that I buy
something that can grow over time as our needs change.  I don't want to
buy a server only to find out later that it cannot meet our needs with
future database projects.  I have to balance a limited budget, room for
future performance growth, and current system requirements.  Trust me it
isn't easy.


Juan

-----Original Message-----
From: Josh Berkus [mailto:josh@agliodbs.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 2:57 AM
To: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Cc: Juan Casero (FL FLC); Luke Lonergan
Subject: Re: [PERFORM] Sun Fire T2000 and PostgreSQL 8.1.3

Juan,

> Ok that is beginning to become clear to me.  Now I need to determine
> if this server is worth the investment for us.  Maybe it is not a
> speed daemon but to be honest the licensing costs of an SMP aware
> RDBMS is outside our budget.

You still haven't explained why you want multi-threaded queries.  This
is sounding like keeping up with the Joneses.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco