ak_s13 wrote:

> We using firebird for a multi-store retail reporting application.
>
> One of our clients is running a system with PC hardware;
> AMD 3000+, 2Gig RAM, SATA RAID5.
>
> We have a proccess that re-calculates consolidated report totals
> based on new department structure changes. This is taking over a week
> to complete on their database (approx. 50Gb).
>
> My question;
> What hardware would could you recommend to allow this process to
> complete in 4-6hours?

It seems to me that you are asking a wrong question here. How about:
How could we tune our queries to be more efficient?.

I really don't know how big database is or how complex data is, but
needing a week to calculate anything seems like a call for
optimization to me.

Do you run many queries? Can you isolate those which are very slow?
Look at plan for each query, it can reveal problems. Many times I have
seen an 1000% speedup when proper indexes are used, or complex UPDATE
statements get rewritten to simple and efficient stored procedures.

--
Milan Babuskov
http://fbexport.sourceforge.net
http://www.flamerobin.org