Tuesday, July 12, 2005

64 Bits: Why? I was wondering when I'd see evidence that commodity 64 bit computing matters. Of course it's nice that memory limits are effectively removed for low-end servers, but the kind of customer who needed > 4G of RAM just went out and bought a 64 bit server. What good was it for the more budget-conscious purchaser of a commodity server? It looks like QlikTech's business intelligence db might be the answer. It's a combination OLAP server+ in-memory db that doesn't have a data loading step, so it works like a big RAM cache for your db. This relatively low cost OLAP solution was mildy interesting when restricted to < 4GB of data, but vastly more useful when paired with commodity 64bit servers and suddenly competitive with much more expensive alternatives. Has cheap 64 bits disrupted anything yet? It seems like it should, but I haven't found any other evidence of it. 8:36:26 AM      comment []  trackback []