266 CHAPTER 13 Down to the Metal: Server Resources and Topology
ancing act to manage this information into a single condensed chapter. If you were hop-
ing to read this chapter and become a guru in systems design issues for database servers,
you will probably be disappointed. What we do hope, however, is that this chapter will
present a summary review of the major systems issues, after which you’ll feel comfort-
able to follow what the gurus constantly rave about.
In essence there is a core set of systems attributes that database designers need to
understand:
• Performance modeling for CPU processing power
• CPU architecture basics
• Client server architectures
• Multiprocessors and nonuniform memory access (NUMA)
• Balancing resources correctly for ...