That's an interesting angle - possibly sacrifice some performance for electricity savings.

I'd still probably err on the performance side, but I hadn't really thought about it that way.

I'd be curious to see what the power consumption of database servers is versus the entire data center - if it is a small percentage (depends on how many database servers you have, obviously) it wouldn't make too much sense to conserve.

With all of the backups to tape (via tape libraries), etc. going on during the night for all of the servers we have, I doubt that (in my company) the hit for indexing and full backups is too high.

Thought provoking...