At my old job when a report was needed I could sit down with someone and pull up results and get immediate feedback, and then refine my queries and ultimately have the data we needed, in the format we needed within 30-90 minutes.

I just started working for a new company with a database containing millions of records and I spent my whole 8 hours making a report that I feel I could have made in less than 2 hours if it were not for the massive amount of data the queries are working with, and the fact that I couldn't ask the person needing the data to sit down with me and give me feedback as I pulled up results as I am used to.

So I am trying to think of how we can make the server faster... much faster, so that I can have the same level of productivity I'm used to. One thought that just came to mind is that memory is so cheap these days, and by my calculations I could buy 10 8gig ram sticks for 1000 bucks. What I have never heard of though is a device that would let me combine these into a huge ram drive.

So I'd like to know if any such device exists, and if not what is the largest ram drive I could realistically make and how would I go about doing so?

EDIT: To you guys who are saying the database shema needs to be analyzed... you can't make a query such as "Select f1, f2, f3, etc from SomeTable" run any faster by normalizing or indexing the table. What I'm talking about IS ABSOLUTELY a need for improved performance at the hardware level.

I am used to having results come back to me in a few seconds, not a few minutes or much less a half an hour. Maybe that's what you guys are used to who have 100 billion record tables and you feel like that's fast, but I'm looking for results back from tables with about 10 million records to come back to me withing less than half a minute TOPS.