Re: Academic help for Postgres

On 11 May 2016 at 12:58, Josh berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:

> Together with that, automated substitution of materialized views for
> query clauses.
>
> Also: optimizing for new hardware, like persistent memory.

I recently saw some material in ACM SIGOPS on tuning filesystems to play
better with some of the new sorts of storage

An interesting such article was thus... <
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2819002> The idea of it was to research
better ways of doing hash table updates with PCM (Phase Change Memory)
which apparently may be up-and-coming but with fairly different write
characteristics than we're used to. You essentially write a fairly large
page at a time, and can only do limited numbers of updates to any given
page.
That encourages things like log-structured filesystems, but with further
efforts to reduce there being "hot spots."

The paper was focused on hash tables; if the hardware turns out to be
important, it'll also be important to have better variations on B-trees.
--
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"