Re: [PERFORMANCE] Buying hardware

On Jan 26, 2009, at 2:42 PM, David Rees wrote:
>
> Lots of people have databases much, much, bigger - I'd hate to imagine
> have to restore from backup from one of those monsters.
>

If you use PITR + rsync you can create a binary snapshot of the db, so
restore time is simply how long it takes to untar / whatever it into
place.  Our backup script basically does:

archive backup directory
pg_start_backup
rsync
pg_stop_backup

voila. I have 2 full copies of the db.  You could even expand it a bit
and after the rsync & friends have it fire up the instance and run
pg_dump against it for a pg_restore compatible dump "just in case".

It takes a long time to restore a 300GB db, even if you cheat and
parallelify some of it. 8.4 may get a  pg_restore that can load in
parallel - which will help somewhat.

--
Jeff Trout <jeff@jefftrout.com>
http://www.stuarthamm.net/
http://www.dellsmartexitin.com/