Re: Using the GPU

Tom Lane wrote:
> "Alexander Staubo" <alex@purefiction.net> writes:
>> On 6/16/07, Tom Allison <tom@tacocat.net> wrote:
>>> It might make an interesting project, but I would be really depressed
>>> if I had to go buy an NVidia card instead of investing in more RAM to
>>> optimize my performance!  <g>
>
>> Why does it matter what kind of hardware you can (not "have to") buy
>> to give your database a performance boost? With a GPU, you would have
>> one more component that you could upgrade to improve performance;
>> that's more possibilities, not less. I only see a problem with a
>> database that would *require* a GPU to achieve adequate performance,
>> or to function at all, but that's not what this thread is about.
>
> Too often, arguments of this sort disregard the opportunity costs of
> development going in one direction vs another.  If we make any
> significant effort to make Postgres use a GPU, that's development effort
> spent on that rather than some other optimization; and more effort,
> ongoing indefinitely, to maintain that code; and perhaps the code
> will preclude other possible optimizations or features because of
> assumptions wired into it.  So you can't just claim that using a GPU
> might be interesting; you have to persuade people that it's more
> interesting than other places where we could spend our
> performance-improvement efforts.

You have a good point.

I don't know enough about how/what people use databases for in general to know
what would be a good thing to work on.  I'm still trying to find out the
particulars of postgresql, which are always sexy.

I'm also trying to fill in the gaps between what I already know in Oracle and
how to implement something similar in postgresq.  But I probably don't know
enough about Oracle to do much there either.

I'm a believer in strong fundamentals over glamour.