McMaster University Creates Open Source eHealth Records System

[Christopher Browne]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 6:04 AM, Dave Cramer <davec-zxk95TxsVYDyHADnj0MGvQC/G2K4zDHf at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 8:52 PM, Dave Germiquet <davegermiquet-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm kinda new in the field of knowing which sql applications are
>> better, recently out of college.
>>
>> How does postgres handle hundreds of thousands to millions of
>> transactions a second?
>>
> It doesn't ...
>
>>
>> How many transactions a second can postgres do?
>
> Transactions per second come down to roughly this equation .. Filesystem I/O
> speed (MB/s) / transaction size (MB)
>
> So the answer to your question is "it depends on the hardware that it is
> installed on".

Well, from a requirement of "millions of transactions per second," we
can infer some interesting things...

For it to be economically viable to track a million transactions per
second, each one must have an economic value of at *least* a few
cents.  If the value isn't that high, then it is hardly necessary to
have each be an individual transaction.

Therefore, the system, in coping with multiple billions of
transactions per hour, and on the order of trillions per week, must
have, somewhere, an economic input of on the order of ten billion
dollars per month, or of something like $100B per year.

Out of a budget of $100B, one can be fairly certain to have enough
money to pay someone to do a proper professional study of this.

Scale that down by a factor of 1000 and it's still a budget of
hundreds of millions of dollars, plenty enough to pay for a proper
study.

The main commercial application area that looks like this is telecom,
where there is a need to track some information about each call
session, and where (indeed) each call costs some pennies.

If someone has an application that genuinely this strenuous in its
requirements, they should be looking for real professional assistance,
asking for recommendations as to who they might hire to do proper
analysis, as opposed to asking vague questions on a public mailing
list.
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