Re: Row Limit on tables

On Fri, 31 May 2002, Tom Lane wrote:

> In practice, "what will fit on your disk" is the limit.

Actually, not even. Or so I think for most cases.

Playing around with my little 500M row table, I notice that the table
itself is only 25 GB, and even with 4 indices, the whole shebang is
less than 60 GB. What's killing me is disk access speed. Currently, my
"standard" query is 70 sec., entirely due to limitations on the number
of random I/Os I can do per second.

I can fairly cheaply halve this problem by striping the database across
two disks, but then I double the space available. If that leads me to
double the database size, I'm back in the same hole I was in before,
maybe worse.

It's way, way too easy these days to run up a terrabyte of RAID-5
storage. One Escalade 7850 controller ($500) plus eight 160 GB drives
($250 each) sets you out about $2500. But the problem is, all this
storage often doesn't have the I/O bandwidth you need actually to make
use of it....

cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs(at)cynic(dot)net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC