Re: Postgres for a "data warehouse", 5-10 TB

On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 6:35 AM, Igor Chudov <ichudov(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> I have a server with about 18 TB of storage and 48 GB of RAM, and 12
> CPU cores.

1 or 2 fast cores is plenty for what you're doing. But the drive
array and how it's configured etc are very important. There's a huge
difference between 10 2TB 7200RPM SATA drives in a software RAID-5 and
36 500G 15kRPM SAS drives in a RAID-10 (SW or HW would both be ok for
data warehouse.)

> I do not know much about Postgres, but I am very eager to learn and
> see if I can use it for my purposes more effectively than MySQL.
> I cannot shell out $47,000 per CPU for Oracle for this project.
> To be more specific, the batch queries that I would do, I hope,

Hopefully if needs be you can spend some small percentage of that for
a fast IO subsystem is needed.

> would either use small JOINS of a small dataset to a large dataset, or
> just SELECTS from one big table.
> So... Can Postgres support a 5-10 TB database with the use pattern
> stated above?

I use it on a ~3TB DB and it works well enough. Fast IO is the key
here. Lots of drives in RAID-10 or HW RAID-6 if you don't do a lot of
random writing.