“When will RAM prices make disk drives obsolete for database developers? I first came across this question when talking with Michael “Monty” Widenius, one of the visonaries behind the MySQL database. For some applications, running entirely in RAM is not news at all. One major platform, the Palm Pilot, relies entirely on battery-powered RAM. Disks are used only occassionally for remote backups.” Read the article at DevChannel by Peter Wayner.
MySQL Creator Contemplates RAM-only Databases
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I use mysql daily … you know what would be cool?
If they made it a real database.
(Stored procedures, relational tables, etc)
Works fine for the small stuff though
(Such as websites like this one)
… while it may be possible for me to type with proper grammar, it’s far too sunny outside for me to bother …
If you just need to store objects and don’t need all the magic of relational calculus you could try something like this: http://www.prevayler.org/
It is based on object serialization and is orders of magnitude faster than “normal” databases for reading. It is not for everyone, of course, but I would love to run my website out of something like that.
at my work we have two sun fire v880 servers, sun microsystems sell the 72gb fc-al hard drive at $4000+, with these prices the only-ram option is good NOW.
NOTE, dont buy the memory at sun.com (kingston works great on these machines)
🙂
I read an article about Google that said they rely on RAM drives for data storage.
quote from the article :”The object model is much harder to manipulate, maintain and back up in the long run. It’s also very hard to fix the data if something goes wrong.”
and for more about “Object Oriented Databases” here
http://searchdatabase.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid13_gci769023,0…
I would think that SWA would be using CICS. http://www-3.ibm.com/software/htp/cics/. It can support over 900K concurrent users.
Sure, Love RAM we do!
Can’t afford the cost usually. Can’t have that in 8 or 10 x redundancy. Raid and unix arrays are still the secure solution.
One of the things they do it turn the standard PC model on its ear. All of the integrated DB is one numberspace, but you can define more. “RAM” is just an area the processor can work with. It’s much like how linux uses all your ram to Cache stuff for performance-only in reverse. They view everything as “ram” and use the hardware paging mechanisms which are an order of magnitude more secure rather than writing “drivers” for everyting”
Linux could get that kind of preformance, but at a cost of flexibility. First, you’d have to run on a box capable of uniquely addressing an entire hard drive or raid array. this would also mean and end to partitioning as we know it!. Said storage would have to be 100% controlled by the system. That means that Kernel/VM/memory manager/disk driver/filesystem/database would all be 1 kernel level module! Then, you’re leveraging the HARDWARE level routines rather than SOFTWARE levels and few of them!
Of course it means changing the way you think about Databases. Then something like prevayler’s Object Based system would fly! You’d gain stabiltiy from “stupid” data corruption errors that plague traditional dababases [most AS400 boxes never have system faulted corruption [it’s always user issues!] No more daily start/stop/rebuild rituals! The drawback is that the disks are intimately tied to the system that created them. Moving or restoring a disk to another box is a tedious procedure-restoring from backup tape is faster!
It’d be an interesting thing to build such a system. It’s perfectly possible with standard PC hardware, but you may loose some disk space due to limitations of x86 chipsets. The other key thing to note is that this would be a headless, monitorless system! [only ethernet and serial port for you!] It would be like those NAS boxes with only the bare essetial apps and no options for more. PC harware is cheap enough to do this with, as the stability gains would far outweigh the costs of an extra box for the webserver, ect. Or, those things could be figured in as well for a whole system, but feature creap would be an issue if you allowed external stuff added and would ruin the point of doing it!