[dba-Tech] Booting Ubuntu from a thumb drive

[Arthur Fuller]

In the past, I have run into problems (more than occasionally) trying to
set up a dual-boot system, where the first boot is Windows and the second
is some variant of Linux. A few times this operation has gone sideways and
resulted in a day wasted recovering from the damage done.

Currently I have two boxes: a dinosaur desktop with 4GBs of DDR2 and lots
of disc space, and successfully running a dual-boot whose choices are
Windows 7 and Linux Mint. That's fine for most purposes, but my latest
project is to explore VoltDB, and a mere 4GBs of RAM will suffice in an
academic sense, but not even begin to approach what I would describe as a
vague simulation of a real-world app environment. My other box, a notebook,
currently runs Windows 8.1 and is a single-boot system, with a bunch of USB
3.0 ports, and a 64GB thumb drive whose data I've just backed up and then
erased.

Having been burned more than once trying to set up a dual-boot, I thought
instead to install Linux on the thumb drive as a bootable system. Since the
thumb has 64GBs, I think that will be enough space for my experiments with
VoltDB, an in-memory database that claims to offer orders of magnitude
greater performance than can be obtained by any disc-based DBMS. Aside from
Linux itself, there should be plenty of room for a test database or two.
Anyway, the notebook has 8GBs of DDR3 RAM, which I grant you is hardly what
a real-world application would require (RWA being defined as millions of
rows and a minimum TPS of 50k); but given the modest resources available to
us retired persons, that will have to do, for purposes of experiment.

So, the goal is to convert the thumb drive to a self-contained Linux
boot+environment. I'm reading Ubuntu's docs on how to achieve this, but
before I make any actual moves, I thought I'd invite contributions
vis-a-vis gotchas, What Out Fors, etc.

(For anyone as yet unacquainted with VoltDB and my interest in it, see
Database legend Michael Stonebraker explains why these databases are
obsolete
<http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2015/03/30/michael-stonebraker-describes-oracles-obsolescence-facebooks-enormous-challenge/?utm_source=dbweekly&utm_medium=email>,
and also the enormous challenge facing Facebook.)

Clearly I need a new client, so I can afford a shiny new box with about
64GBs of RAM so I can exercise this new horse. Fortunately I have some
lovely software from Red Gate that will enable me to create databases whose
tables number into the millions of rows, replete with RI and all the other
bells and whistles, so manufacturing databases worth the effort and
analysis is the most trivial part of the experiments to follow.

It happens that I am currently awaiting the Go-Ahead from a previous client
to rewrite her system so it can run on her smart-phone and tablet. Should
the project receive its Go-Ahead, then it will result in sufficient loot to
purchase the system as sketched above (Linux-based, massive RAM, and a few
TBs of disk-based storage just to be safe).

-- 
Arthur