Quote from DarthSidious:
garch, can you provide some more details on what you are trying to store? I am no position to give a definitive answer as I have very recently started to put together something very similar to you.
Remember, this is experimental / proof of concept stage
system (definitely qualifies as cheap / old) :
mysql 5 on ubuntu 64
Core 2 CPU 6300 @ 1.86GHz (dual core)
4GB RAM
commodity SATA disks in raid1 (linux software raid)
At present I am storing futures data only (well, I have only started getting data from here & there and loading them, changing database schema as I go along - strictly work in progress. Plan to store daily & 1 minute resolution data only. Tick data, if I plan to store in future, would be in a) binary files with (possibly) links from within mysql or b) binary fields within mysql itself. Perhaps a day's worth of ticks on 1 ticker in one file / row. I think trying to store one tick per row is simply not workable.
I am also storing one symbol per table. _ESZ09_m, for example stores all 1 minute data for ESZ09 from listing to expiry. About 100k+ rows per table. For stocks, my estimate is.. let's see.. IBM 20 years of 1 minute data = 20*250*390 = 1,950,000, ignoring non RTH data - still not too bad. I can do a select * on the table about 0.59 second. with some "tradedate between 'this and 'that'" is still under a second.
I also have a bunch of mysql stored functions and procs that string together series to produce adjusted / unadjusted continuous contracts - those take a bit of time - but that's processing time, and I do not need to do that very often.
Are you seeing similar times or better / worse?