Re: Massive scalability

["Mark H. Wood" <mwood@IUPUI.Edu>]

The width of the ALU is probably much less significant, in this
application, than the amount of memory and the I/O bandwidth.

Since it's IBM iron, I wouldn't be terribly worried about the I/O
bandwidth, although I'm certain that someone could come up with a
pathological configuration. :-)

The more memory, the greater the likelihood that the index blocks needed
for any query will be found in the buffer cache rather than needing a trip
to storage and back.  With 30 million objects, there's going to be a lot
of index to root through.  Memory accesses take nanoseconds; storage
accesses take milliseconds.

Speaking of indices, be sure that you create and maintain the ones that
best serve your expected access patterns.

-- 
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood@IUPUI.Edu
MS Windows *is* user-friendly, but only for certain values of "user".