Hi, I am looking for a little advice in setting up Red Hat and MySQL for a large database (at least I consider it to be large). My database will contain 2 large tables that are updated daily. The first table currenly has 19 million records and ~70 columns largely made up of varchar(20), char(5) and integers. It has a natural primary key and a composite index on 3 of the character columns. The second table currently has 400 million records and ~30 columns again made up of varchar(20), char(5) and integers. This table's primary key is defined using 2 columns and also has a composite index on the same 3 columns as the first table. Lastly, I will frequently join the two tables in my queries.
My system has 4gb ram, 500 gb hard drive (result of a RAID 5 configuration) and 2 dual core Intel 64 bit procs. I have chosen to use Red Hat EL5. Here are the questions I have to help optimize the performance: * Should I continue with the RAID 5? I am not too concerned of recovery. I am more concerned about I/O performance. * Is there a hard drive partition scheme that would help the performance (separate the large db schema /var/lib/mysql/schema_name)? * Should I partition the tables? There is a natural partition for the 400m table by date; there is not a natural partition for the other. Should I make one up? * Are there specific additions to the /etc/my.cnf that I should add to maximize the systems capabilities? * Please let me know of other things I should consider. Thanks in advance, Jason
