On March 3, 2003 09:01 am, Leyne, Sean (Ext. 225) wrote:

> Paul,
>
> {This thread is getting off-topic for this list so let's not keep this
> going too much longer}

Okay, my last comment on this thread....

> > Okay, according to the latest Toronto Computes, a random
> > advert shows a Seagate Cheetah SCSI 146GB going for
> > ~$1499 CDN so that works out to around $189,000 CDN for
> > the drives, figuring we can get 147GB drives for the same
> > price,
>
> Obviously, you not looked at the cost of Compaq authorized parts ;-)))

Considering that a $10 floppy drive goes for $110 I would figure that an
official Compaq sanctioned 147GB hard drive is probably close to $4K, but I
just wanted to throw a number in there.....

>
> > Next question, would a PC be powerful enough to reasonably
> > quickly do queries on that size of database?
>
> Why not? You don't think that a 16/32-way server with 64GB of RAM could
> run such a database?

It definitely could, however is such a machine really just a PC. When most
people (including me) think of a PC we think of a desktop or Mini/Mid tower,
not a machine that takes up as much room as an IBM 4381 with 2 3380
DASD units, and costs about the same.

> I'm sure that there are a 5000+ corporate groups which are running 16TB+
> databases from PC Servers.

The real issue is, if you bought the computer, and decided to run Firebird on
it, would Firebird be happy to manage your 16TB+ database?