Hi,
database design and hardware requirements are never easy. There are a lot of scientific papers on work load tests and requirement assumptions. I can not give a short answer which machine to use. Just some ideas and starting points.
The most important parts of a database system with large data sets are network bandwidth, RAM and storage bandwidth. With smaller data sets and more complex transactions the CPU becomes more important.
In this TS case the data sets are usually rather small. If the queries are not too complex, the requirements seems to be not too high.
Database performance is usually measured in transactions per minute (tpm). Special database servers can perform several thousands tpm and have costs starting at about 15 $ per tpm. See MS' ad page for a g
ood starting point: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/evaluation/compare/benchmarks.asp
You may also visit the TPC.org homepage.
To be more specific.
I'd choose a modern Intel-based system like P4-3MHz (that have virtual multiprocessors) with at least 512 MB RAM and a RAID5 hard disk storage system (not nercessarily SCSII) with at least 3 single HDs. Use a 100 MB LAN connection at least, best with a switch. Don't forget backup!
Check also the pages of your preferred database provider.
I am on a starting point here too. We have chosen mySQL, which runs (at least now) on the very same machine where TS & LV are running. We plan to test this setup with increasing burden to get a practical assumption of the HW requirements. The planned final setup will have up to 5 test stations and 5 query stations. We'll run about 50 rather complex tests of about 4 hours each that operate in parallel on the test stations.
HTH and
Greetings from Germany
--
Uwe
