Quoting Jim Starkey <jas@...>:

> Cooking benchmarks doesn't impress anyone. And nobody selects a
> database on performance unless it's a weirdo application with unusually
> requirements. Being a slug doesn't do you any good, but presenting a
> benchmark with the consistency of overdone pot roast doesn't do your
> credibility any good, either.

OK, forget about benchmarks. If you don't like the trick to use my
cheap 200 MB RAM-disk then consider the big-iron solution of SAN: a
multi-gigabyte storage solution with a 2 Gigabyte/s bandwidth (now you
get it for a price between 10k to 20k USD, depending on vendor).
The problem remains: if you can forget about "HDD slow - memory fast" and
you move to another level (where the speed of memory and the speed of storage
are on the same order of magnitude, be it in a RAM disk or SAN) what changes
can be done (either in code or in database configuration) in order to get
a performance boost?
Right now my development system at home has 1GB RAM. For a production system
it is not unusual to have 2 GB or even 4 GB. For a small database (500MB-1GB)
would you consider using it in a RAM-disk?

Tiberiu