Hi all,

The boss asked what configuration would be best for a DBMS. It's a "how
many angels..." type of question without a specific application in mind
but I'd still like some advice on how to respond.

The only parameter I have is that the database is read-mostly with
bursty write traffic. I am assuming pgSQL 8.1 since that is what I've
ported all the icky MySQL stuff to. Databases are all small, our
biggest current backup is only 50 MB (yes, M). Also assuming no more
that $6k budget.

At the moment we have the equivalent of weblogs stored in there and the
reports on them can take as long as 30 seconds. The machine we're
running on has 4GB but 1/2 of which is consumed by Tomcat.

RAID 10, battery backed cache, dedicated machine with 4GB memory, that
much is obvious. But are more than 2 CPUs (1 dual-core) better for a
reporting database? How many drives? One for xlog, 4 for data?

-arturo