The problem I have with VMWare is that for the cost of a licence plus the additional hardware on the box running it (CPU power, RAM, etc.) I can buy a second cheap machine, using VMWare doesn't appear to save me my biggest overheads of training staff on Unix and cost of equipment (software and hardware). I've been looking at Bochs, but 1.4.1 wasn't stable enough to install RedHat, PostgreSQL, etc. reliably.
The database in question holds order information for over 2000 other companies, and is growing daily. There is also a requirement to keep the data indefinatley. The developers are developing two things; 1- Providing an interface for the companies employees to update customer information and answer customer queries. 2- Providing an area for merchants to log into that allows them to generate some standardised reports over the order data, change passwords, setup repeated payment system, etc. Developing these solutions does include the possibilities of modify the database schema, the configuration of the database, and the datatypes used to represent the data (e.g. representing encyrpted data as a Base64 string or blob), and therefore the developers may need to make fundamental changes to the database and perform metrics on how they have affected performance. Hope this helps, Al. ----- Original Message ----- From: "scott.marlowe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "bpalmer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "D'Arcy J.M. Cain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, November 26, 2002 9:13 PM Subject: Re: [mail] Re: [HACKERS] Native Win32 sources > On Tue, 26 Nov 2002, bpalmer wrote: > > > > > D'Arcy, > > > > > > > > In production the database servers are seperate multi-processor machines > > > > with mirrored disks linked via Gigabit ethernet to the app server. > > > > > > > > In development I have people extremely familiar with MS, but not very hot > > > > with Unix in any flavour, who are developing Java and PHP code which is then > > > > passed into the QA phase where it's run on a replica of the production > > > > environment. > > > > > > > > My goal is to allow my developers to work on the platform they know (MS), > > > > using as many of the aspects of the production environment as possible (JVM > > > > version, PHP version, and hopefully database version), without needing to > > > > buy each new developer two machines, and incur the overhead of them > > > > familiarising themselves with a flavour of Unix. > > > > (from experience in a large .com web site) > > > > Can you have a central DB server? Do all the dev DB servers need to be > > independent? You could even have a machine w/ ip*(# developers) and bind > > a postgresql to each ip for each developer (assuming you had enough > > memory, etc). > > > > We used oracle once upon a time at my .com and used seperate schemas for > > the seperate developers. This may be tricky for your environment > > because the developers would need to know what schema they would connect > > to if all schemas were under the same pgsql instance. > > >From what the original post was saying, it looks more like they're working > on a smaller semi-embedded type thing, like a home database of cds or > something like that. OR at least something small like one or two people > would use like maybe a small inventory system or something. > > High speed under heavy parallel access wasn't as important as good speed > for one or two users for this application. > > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- > TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/users-lounge/docs/faq.html
