[Info-Ingres] Time to say goodbye to the 2k page size?

[Roy Hann]

"Steve McElhinney" <stevem at 141.com> wrote in message 
news:1193238353.562307.171880 at q3g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> We will be upgrading several systems to Ingres 2006 R2 in the coming
> months.
>
> One proposal is that we start using 8k page size for *all* database
> tables,
> plus row-level locking on all tables.
> i.e. this would be our default configuration for all Ing 2006 R2
> systems
> - unless for a particular application there is a good reason not to.
>
> Any thoughts ... pitfalls?  Has anyone gone down this route?

We haven't set 8kb pages as the new default on any existing systems but just 
last week we had to modify a table to use 16kb pages because it hit the 
8-million page limit using 8kb pages!

The point being, 2kb pages are tiny.  They made sense in the age of RA81s, 
but we're well into the 21st century now and 8kb seems (empirically) to be a 
good one-size-fits-all page size.  I am using it as the default page size 
for all new databases.  The 2kb page has other limitations too as you well 
know; it doesn't support ALTER TABLE adding and dropping columns, and there 
is no possibility of using row-level locking.  There may be good reason to 
suppose they don't support table scanning as efficiently either.

Good riddance to 2kb pages, I say.

Roy