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June 07, 2004
Virtualizing away from the disk?
In my entry entitled Learning JNDI I wonder whether we're virtualizing away from the disk. That is to say, when the disk access rate no longer holds up the rest of the server, will moving the database to memory for faster access help?
With a 64-bit server, we already support holding all data in memory cache. That memory cache remains volatile across server restarts. The disk therefore becomes a bottleneck when you write new data, and as we suggest you write that data to disk for safety.
Perhaps we could allow for duplicated, networked memory caches? We've seen it done in replicated databases. That would probably cost a lot to implement correctly.
Posted by Mark at June 7, 2004 08:23 AM