2004-02-24
Pickup some RAM?
While being in the midst of scales and loops for an upcoming theatrical project, I came across the following snippet about memory resident datasets:
Consider the insane cost to implement this simple feature. Google has to keep a copy of every web page on the Internet on their servers in order to show you the piece of the web page where your search terms hit.
The scale reference is immediately apparent and daunting!... but what about the loop? Loop back to 1998, while presenting the brave new 1970s frontier of RDBMS and its application to web publishing, Philip Greenspun described it curtly:
There are several ways to achieve high performance. One is to buy a huge multi-processor computer with enough RAM to hold the entire data model at once. Unfortunately, unless you are using PostgreSQL, your RDBMS vendor will probably give your bank account a reaming that it will not soon forget.SV @ 8:53