[wellylug] My new linux server

[Brent Wood]

nvolved...)
> 
> 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...

Umm... if you install Linux & partition with one drive & no motherboard RAID,
things will get very screwy after you add a second drive. Most motherboards
don't implement a full hardware RAID, & the OS will typically use different
drivers in a RAID & non-RAID system, even with the same controller chip.

>  
> > 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...

Yep, tho I was referring to x86 64bit as pioneered by AMD & now availble (sort
of) in some Xeon chips. The Opteron version is setting all sorts of SMP X86
server performance records.

> 
> 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!  :)

More than likely. Database & file servers are optimised for robustnes & data
security way ahead of performance.

>
> 
> Ahhh...teething issues...it'll only make you bigger and stronger!  :) 

Don't need to get any bigger :-)


> Why do you want readline support with postgres?

For command line SQL editing, very convenient when you type as well (ot not) as
I do... 


>  
> > 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.

'tis a growth industry, but grads are popping out to work in the area, & Open
Source GIS is not a big thing in NZ, just a bit here & there.


> 
> 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...

Pretty effective. As an Oracle user you won't have too many problems.

> 
> 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.

Yep. pgpool I think is the currently preferred flavour of Postgres replication,
tho on a single box I'd have thought a good RAID solution as effective.



Enjoy...

  Brent