Summary

Building a database server with good performance is hard work. There are many individual components that are available in multiple quality levels and corresponding costs. Also there are plenty of small details you must get right or you'll risk data corruption. Luckily, you don't have to start from scratch. Stick to common, well understood components with known good performance, while keeping an eye on reliability too, and you can build a well balanced database server for a reasonable budget. Always make sure to run your own benchmarks on the result though. It's very easy to sabotage even good equipment with the wrong configuration when running a database.

  • Allocating your hardware budget among CPUs, memory, and disks is very application dependent.
  • Carefully selecting and configuring your controller and disk caches is critical for reliable database operation.
  • Make sure you are monitoring components in your server that are likely to fail or have a known lifetime, particularly hard drives and the batteries in disk controller cards.
  • Any disk write caches in your system must be confirmed to properly support the write flushing mechanism the database uses, or database corruption can result.
  • The maximum rate that database clients can commit transactions can be very low without a properly implemented write-back cache.
上一章目录下一章