Re: Large Databases

[Joe Conway <mail(at)joeconway(dot)com>]

elein wrote:
> I thought NFS was not recommended. Did I misunderstand this
> or is there some kind of limitation to using different kinds(?)
> of NFS.

I've seen that sentiment voiced over and over. And a few years ago, I 
would have joined in.

But the fact is *many* large Oracle installations now run over NFS to 
NAS. When it was first suggested to us, our Oracle DBAs said "no way". 
But when we were forced to try it due to hardware failure (on our 
attached fibre channel array) a few years ago, we found it to be 
*faster* than the locally attached array, much more flexible, and very 
robust. Our Oracle DBAs would never give it up at this point.

I suppose there *may* be some fundamental technical difference that 
makes Postgres less reliable than Oracle when using NFS, but I'm not 
sure what it would be -- if anyone knows of one, please speak up ;-). 
Early testing on NFS mounted NAS has been favorable, i.e. at least the 
data does not get corrupted as it did on the SAN. And like I said, our 
only other option appears to be spreading the data over multiple 
volumes, which is a route we'd rather not take.

Joe