Re: would hw acceleration help postgres (databases in general) ?

On 12/10/10 3:09 PM, Hamza Bin Sohail wrote:
> There is not much utility  in doing this if there aren't considerable compute-
> intensive operations in the database (which i would be surprise if true ). I 
> would suspect joins, complex queries etc may be very compute-intensive. Please 
> correct me if i'm wrong. Moreover, if you were told that you have a 
> reconfigurable hardware which can perform pretty complex computations 10x 
> faster than the base, would you think about synthesizing it directly on an fpga 
> and use it ?  

Databases are, in general, CPU-bound.  Most activities are
compute-intensive.  Even things you might think would be I/O-bound ...
like COPY ... end up being dominated by parsing and building data
structures.

So, take your pick.  COPY might be a good place to start, actually,
since the code is pretty isolated and it would be easy to do tests.

Or am I using a different definition of "compute-intensive" than you are?

--                                  -- Josh Berkus                                    PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
                        http://www.pgexperts.com