Richard Hwang

A member of the Philip Greenspun's Homepage community since August 13, 1999

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August 13, 1999, on Choosing a Relational Database:
More info about NetApps (http://www.netapp.com/): They don't run a proprietary operating system; they run NetBSD (http://www.netbsd.org/) with a totally wickedly cool proprietary filesystem. They used to run on Intel Pentium 75 CPUs(!), but nowadays they all are based on Alpha chips (they're essentially PC-class machines). Here are some of the reasons you want to buy one: 1. The filesystem is one of the primary reasons you want to buy one of these puppies. You can grow and shrink the filesystem while it's still in use! Any other RAID solution will require you to repartition when adding/removing drives. 2. It also does snapshots of the filesystems at customizable intervals. Just deleted an important file? No problem - there is a hidden ".snapshot" directory in every directory from where you can retrieve your file. Are you about to do something to your files that you might regret? No problem - do a manual snapshot first. 3. Worried about network throughput? They've ...