Re: Minimising disk writes

On 8/12/06, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:

> > I'm at the investigation stage of a project that involves putting a
> > database on an embedded device.  One of the problems we face is that
> > the filesystem is on Flash Memory so we need to minimize any writes.

> > Is it just a bad idea to use postgresql for this type of thing?
> Fraid so ... PG is not designed with the idea of avoiding disk writes,
> indeed it's pretty aggressive at pushing committed data out to disk.
> You could maybe get away with flash storage for a read-mostly, very
> low update rate database, but the software isn't going to help you
> do it :-(
How feasible would it be to have the pg_data structure copied from
the Flash to e.g. a RAM disk, and only write it back occasionally? Or
have the "busier" parts, if the application has such, in RAM.
Of course I have no idea how big the flash-memory and the actual
RAM are, and the idea may be completely off.


Cheers,
Andrej