Summary on "Re:knowledge needed"

Hi netters Thanks to all who replied to my note "knowledge needed" Your hints and experience were quite helpful. Here is a very rough summary of the answers: >I need to create a database with 8 million entries in >one table with about 300 byte per record. That makes >more or less 2.4 GB - more than an average disk. This shoud not be considered a "big" database. Graeme Sargent claims, that 14 billion rows are giving him sleepless nights. ( Lucky me ! :^) ) Generally Online 5.x was recommended. It seems to be no problem to split data-tables over more than one physical hard disk. The amount of RAM needed depends (of course) on a lot of things I didn't mention in my posting so the recommendations varied from "impossible to say. Is it a server or a host only ?" ( Carlton Doe ) over "Online manual has no specifics for RAM, We have 100+ users for one DB and use 47MB of RAM for the engine ALONE. (Not to mention user mem)." (Jack Parker) to "96 MB at a very wild guess" (Richard Ridley) Apparentlty the response time can only be estimated, when the conditions under which Online works are exactly specified. I couldn't do that then, that is why the answers have a wide range (from 0.25 sec to 20 sec. depending in different asumptions) Thanks to all who took the effort for calculations anyway. Concerning the use of RAID devices only two of the experts have experience. Richard Ridley found a RAID-3 device miserable performing, Graeme Sargent only can recommend Pyramid s/w Raid (claiming this would be an expensive peripheral fo a Sun.) He shoud know. Chris ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Christoph Maethner voice +49 211 990 77 81 systems engineer fax +49 211 990 75 70 Rank Xerox Germany e-mail chmae@guug.de mae.sbd@rxg:Xerox:com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------