Unrepentant Techno-Hermit, forever trying to make less do more.
Well, as an example, when nvidia next demonstrates that one of the biggest companies on the face of planet Earth just cannot possibly afford to hire a couple of more developers to maintain their drivers and keep up with Kernel development and your Window Manager consequently fails to run, a TTY is nice for downgrading the drivers to a version that actually works. :)
TTY’s are one of those thing that aren’t as often required these days as they used to be, but - and trust me on this - should you ever encounter one of the increasingly rare situations where you really need them, you’ll suddenly be very, very glad they exist.
To paraquote H. L. Mencken: For every problem, there is a solution that’s cheap, fast, easy to implement – and wrong.
Silver bullets and magic wands don’t really exist, I’m afraid. There’s amble reasons for DBA’s being well-paid people.
There’s basically three options: Either increase the hardware capabilities to be able to handle the amount of data you want to deal with, decrease the amount of data so that the hardware you’ve got can handle it at the level of performance you want or… Live with the status quo.
If throwing more hardware at the issue was an option, I presume you would just have done so. As for how to viably decrease the amount of data in your active set, well, that’s hard to say without knowledge of the data and what you want to do with it. Is it a historical dataset or time series? If so, do you need to integrate the entire series back until the dawn of time, or can you narrow the focus to a recent time window and shunt old data off to cold storage? Is all the data per sample required at all times, or can details that are only seldom needed be split off into separate detail tables that can be stored on separate physical drives at least?
“Oh no. Our automatic door seems to have suffered a unfortunate malfunction while you were trying to leave the premises.”
Glad to have you with us. I daresay a retired Unix admin might be able to make more than a few good suggestions for improvements, which ultimately benefits everybody. God, I love open source.