[wellylug] My new linux server

[Abhinav Keswani]

Hi there,

> Unless you wanna reformat at some stage, you may be better off setting up with
> two drives & setting up your RAID partitions at day one. I know there are
> claims that you can resize & modify working partitions, but I have yet to see
> it work when software RAID is involved...)

Yeah - I had anticipated this to some extent and have read the user
manual for the motherboard and there it implies (doesn't actually say
much) that you can insert your second disk and carefully pick the
source disk, and then mirror to the freshly inserted one.  Striping is
another matter of course.  Comes out reading well but I don't know
what it'll be like in reality!  Let's see if the budget stretches far
enough to buy a second disk to start with...
 
> The AMD64 platform with a 64 bit Linux has some very good benchmarks under
> Postgres, but for a basic testbed you prob won't see much difference. Better
> I/O, as well as faster floating point/integer. Not quite as smooth as a P4 for
> multitasking when hyperthreading actually works though...

I have only had experience with Itanium and know that it'll best
perform for oltp and olap apps....apps that will benefit from
parallelism and a big and fast processor cache plus main mem.  For a
home machine, I could write some gratuitous C code to try to push the
machine but the point of getting it is only for me to get across the
usage and construction basics of databases and applications and get
some modicum of performance...

Last year I did this on a borrowed box to learn about Oracle DataGuard
(poor man's RAC!) and it worked a treat.  In fact I still suspect that
my little sandbox will outperform some production instances of oracle
I have seen!  :)
 
> (I'm in the middle of trying to find out why under Ubuntu AMD64 I can't compile
> Postgres v8 with readline support. But I've only had Ubuntu installed for a day
> or so, so a few teething issues are the norm....)

Ahhh...teething issues...it'll only make you bigger and stronger!  :) 
Why do you want readline support with postgres?
 
> Have you played with Oracle Spatial or PostGIS at all?

No - but if I want to move to Welly then I had better learn because I
hear that there is some work available in the GIS field.

I've mostly worked with running a couple of biggish instances of
Oracle with Oracle Text (context, intermedia whatever the hell they
are calling it this week) and hacking lots of little plsql procs and
functions to pull application level code inside the
database...portability is king.
 
PostGres is new to me but I have a mate who is helping me get a
running start with it in a week or so...

My thing is to build as failsafe an oracle architecture as possible. 
So implementing RAC with a shared filesystem for two instances on the
one machine will be my first project.

-Abhinav