Looking for database hosting

Hi,
the company I'm doing work for is expecting a 20 times increase in
data and seeks a 10 times increase in performance. Having pushed our
database server to the limit daily for the past few months we have
decided we'd prefer to be database users rather than database server
admins. :-)

Are you or can you recommend a database hosting company that is good
for clients that require more power than what a single database
server can offer?

Cheers

Nik

Nik, you may be underestimating just how much performance can be obtained
from a single database server. For example, an IBM p595 server connected to
an array of ds8300 storage devices could reasonably be expected to provide
several orders of magnitude more performance when compared to commodity
hardware. In commodity space (albeit, just barely), a 16 core opteron
running (the admittedly yet-to-be-released) FreeBSD 7, and a suitably
provisioned SAN should also enormously outperform a beige-box solution, and
at a fraction of the cost. If it's performance you care about then the
pgsql-performance list (which I have cc'd) is the place to talk about it.

I realize this doesn't address your desire to get out of database server
administration. I am not aware of any company which provides database
hosting, further I'm not entirely convinced that's a viable business
solution. The technical issues (security, latency and reliability are the
ones that immediately come to mind) associated with a hosted database server
solution suggest to me that this would not be economically viable. The
business issues around out-sourcing a critical, if not central component of
your architecture seem, at least to me, to be insurmountable.

Andrew

On 8/19/07, Niklas Saers <niklassaers(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
> the company I'm doing work for is expecting a 20 times increase in
> data and seeks a 10 times increase in performance. Having pushed our
> database server to the limit daily for the past few months we have
> decided we'd prefer to be database users rather than database server
> admins. :-)
>
> Are you or can you recommend a database hosting company that is good
> for clients that require more power than what a single database
> server can offer?
>
> Cheers
>
> Nik
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to
> choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not
> match
>

Hello,

Just to note something interesting on database scalability: i'm not sure
whether your database is used for processing or just data lookup, but if
it's used for data lookup, look into memcached -- it's a really scalable
caching system which can reduce your database load a lot.

I know a lot of large websites (slashdot, livejournal, etc) use this
solution -- they have dozens of gigabytes worth of memcached processes to
reduce the cache hits (I'm told livejournal has around 200 of those servers
running, making sure around 99.99% of the database queries are just cache
hits). This probably has been discussed on this list before, but just in
case: look into it.

Regards,

Leon Mergen

On 8/19/07, Andrew Hammond <andrew(dot)george(dot)hammond(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Nik, you may be underestimating just how much performance can be obtained
> from a single database server. For example, an IBM p595 server connected to
> an array of ds8300 storage devices could reasonably be expected to provide
> several orders of magnitude more performance when compared to commodity
> hardware. In commodity space (albeit, just barely), a 16 core opteron
> running (the admittedly yet-to-be-released) FreeBSD 7, and a suitably
> provisioned SAN should also enormously outperform a beige-box solution, and
> at a fraction of the cost. If it's performance you care about then the
> pgsql-performance list (which I have cc'd) is the place to talk about it.
>
> I realize this doesn't address your desire to get out of database server
> administration. I am not aware of any company which provides database
> hosting, further I'm not entirely convinced that's a viable business
> solution. The technical issues (security, latency and reliability are the
> ones that immediately come to mind) associated with a hosted database server
> solution suggest to me that this would not be economically viable. The
> business issues around out-sourcing a critical, if not central component of
> your architecture seem, at least to me, to be insurmountable.
>
> Andrew
>
>
> On 8/19/07, Niklas Saers <niklassaers(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> > the company I'm doing work for is expecting a 20 times increase in
> > data and seeks a 10 times increase in performance. Having pushed our
> > database server to the limit daily for the past few months we have
> > decided we'd prefer to be database users rather than database server
> > admins. :-)
> >
> > Are you or can you recommend a database hosting company that is good
> > for clients that require more power than what a single database
> > server can offer?
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> > Nik
> >
> > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> > TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to
> > choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not
> > match
> >
>
>

--
Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com

Folks,

Please remove pgsql-jobs from your CC list with this thread. That list is
ONLY for employment ads. Thank you.

> Nik, you may be underestimating just how much performance can be
> obtained from a single database server ...

--
--Josh

Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco