Re: Big 7.1 open items

Don Baccus <dhogaza@pacifier.com>

From: Don Baccus <dhogaza@pacifier.com>
To: Thomas Lockhart <lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu>, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Jan Wieck <JanWieck@yahoo.com>, Hiroshi Inoue <Inoue@tpf.co.jp>, Bruce Momjian <maillist@candle.pha.pa.us>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>, "Ross J. Reedstrom" <reedstrm@rice.edu>
Date: 2000-06-16T18:14:35Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
At 04:27 PM 6/16/00 +0000, Thomas Lockhart wrote:

>Sorry for being behind here, but to make sure I'm on the right page:
>o tablespaces decouple storage from logical tables
>o a database lives in a default tablespace, unless specified
>o by default, a table will live in the default tablespace
>o (eventually) a table can be split across tablespaces

Or tablespaces across filesystems/mountpoints whatever.

>Some thoughts:
>o the ability to split single tables across disks was essential for
>scalability when disks were small. But with RAID, NAS, etc etc isn't
>that a smaller issue now?

Yes for size issues, I should think, especially if you have the 
money for a large RAID subsystem.  But for throughput performance,
control over which spindles particularly busy tables and indices
go on would still seem to be pretty relevant, when they're being
updated a lot.  In order to minimize seek times.

I really can't say how important this is in reality.  Oracle-world
folks still talk about this kind of optimization being important,
but I'm not personally running any kind of database-backed website
that's busy enough or contains enough storage to worry about it.

>o "tablespaces" would implement our less-developed "with location"
>feature, right? Splitting databases, whole indices and whole tables
>across storage is the biggest win for this work since more users will
>use the feature.
>o location information needs to travel with individual tables anyway.



- Don Baccus, Portland OR <dhogaza@pacifier.com>
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