Re: Question about Hardware & Configuration for Massive

At 11:39 AM -0700 1/19/06, Kevin & Jessica Hermansen wrote:
>I'm looking to set up an informational database which will be 
>accessed by the general public on our website (there will be no 
>internal users).  The database will likely have about 10 million 
>records with a total database size of 200-300 GB.  All 10 million 
>records will be very similar (the same data fields), so I anticipate 
>that the entire database will be just 1 table.  This is the main 
>application that will be running on our server.  Users will be 
>querying the database by searching either a particular field (or 
>multiple fields) or by doing a full text search.

Is the public access going to be entirely read-only? You may find it 
advantageous to have multiple database machines kept synchronized 
with slony, and distribute the queries from the website across the 
read-only systems. If a reasonably priced machine can manage, say, 
five simultaneous nasty queries in your timeframe, it's usually a 
*lot* cheaper to buy ten of those systems to handle fifty queries 
than it is to beef up the system enough so that one machine can 
handle fifty queries.

It also makes it a lot easier to add on more capacity as you need it 
(or as the budget allows) this way -- throw an extra machine or three 
into the cluster as time and cash permit and need demands.

This may not work for you, depending on your needs, but it's worth 
some consideration, in case it does.
-- 
				Dan

--------------------------------------it's like this-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                       teddy bears get drunk