Running large DB's on FreeBSD

[Oliver Fromme]

Mike Jakubik wrote:
 >     I am in the process of implementing a fairly large mysql server for 
 > an even larger company, and naturally i want to use FreeBSD. The 
 > hardware will be an HP DL385, 2 x dual-core Opterons, 16GB RAM,  7 x 15k 
 > rpm disks in a RAID5 setup. I'm not exactly informed as to the specific 
 > workload yet, however i know the database will have several million rows 
 > and be larger than 10GB.

As others have noted, RAID5 is worst-case for databases.
For both reliability and performance I recommend RAID1 or
RAID10.

 >     So, first of all, am i crazy for choosing fbsd+mysql for this rather 
 > than something like Solaris + Oracle? :)

My recommendation is FreeBSD + PostgreSQL.  I've worked
quite a lot with various Mysql and PostgreSQL databases
in the past, and the latter outperforms other combinations
in general.  Also it is my impression that PostgreSQL is
much more reliable and resistant against evil things like
crashes (power failure or whatever), thanks to its WAL
data storage which is similar to a journaled file system
(transaction-aware, of course).

A few years ago (2002) I fed the German phone book into a
PostgreSQL database running on a Pentium-III 800 MHz with
256 MB RAM (FreeBSD 4-stable).  I was just curious how well
it would cpe with that.  Importing the 35.6 million rows
and creating an index took 40 Minutes (I think I didn't
even use the optimized COPY instruction, so it could have
been even faster).  Select commands on the table were
processed surprisingly fast, but I didn't really hammer
on it because the machine was running a production Apache
at the same time.  :-)

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme,  secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
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