From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Tue Jul 13 1999 - 02:49:24 MDT
James Rogers writes:
> Microsoft was trying to appeal to the PHB types who are easily impressed by
> the word "terabyte". Only a fool would try to run a large online database
> on a Microsoft OS, but I've seen numerous people try at places I've worked.
> The results have always been less than impressive.
What would be interesting is to move the (thoroughly debugged;
RAID-capable; journalling) file system into the periperal storage
unit itself. It can be based on some simple embedded OS, even no need
to go multitasking -- to maximize simplicity. Perhaps even move most
of it into hardware?
I think the chiefest reason against just putting objects into
nonvolatile virtual memory vs. using file systems currently
is instability. Horrible to lose a large database to a simple
system crash. Of course with checkpointing (periodic total
system state snapshots) and extremely stable software this
might become less an issue.
It would be interesting to speculate if a simplified Linux could ever
grow stable enough for this.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:04:28 MST