Re: big, fast, etc, was is Vax addressing sane today

On Fri, 13 Sep 2024 11:20:06 -0000 (UTC)
Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:

Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no> schrieb:
 

10-15 years ago I talked to another speaker at a conference, he
told me that he was working on high-end open source LDAP software
using _very_ large memory DBs: Their system allowed one US cell
phone company to keep every SIM card (~100M) on a single system,
while a similar-size competitor had been forced to fall back on
17-way sharding (presumably using a hash of the SIM id). 

 
Keeping databases in memory is definitely a thing now... see SAP HANA.
 
Any architectural implications for this?
 
Browsing through the SAP pages, it seems they used Intel's Optane
persistent memory, but that is no longer manufactured (?).  But
having fast, persistent storage is definitely an advantage for
databases.
 
Large memory: Of course.
 
On the ISA level... these databases run on x86, so that seems to
be good enough.
 
Anything else?
 

Another thing that SAP HANA seems to use more intensely than anybody
else is Intel TSX. TSX (at least RTM part, I am not sure about HLE
part) still present in the latest Xeon generation, but is strongly
de-emphasized.