Re: Benchmarks

In article <1993Oct1.113125.13914@xact.demon.co.uk> ptm@xact.demon.co.uk (Paul Thomas Mahoney) writes: >We are looking for a faster system. Vendors "publish" "spec mark" >figures for their machines: eg SPARC, IBM RS/600, DEC-Alpha etc... > >Unfortunately our current system is a 50MHz 486 system running SCO. What >we need to do is obtain the benchmark software to compile and run on >our system so we can compare the results against the vendors published >figures. > >Anyone know where I can pickup the benchmarking software for testing >RDBMS performance? > The best benchmark is your own application. Since you already have an application written, you should try to run it on the different hardware. If the vendors really want to sell you their boxes, then they'll let you run your own tests. The standard benchmarks for RDBMS performance are the TPC benchmarks (Transaction Processing Performance Council, 408-295-8894). The problem with these is that they have specific rules for the hardware configuration and database size, which probably don't match what you have. Your best bet is to get the results list from the TPC (or on dg-rtp.dg.com in the tpc directory) and find the closest system to yours, and then compare it to other equipment. The thing about the TPC results is that you are not likely to find a result for your particular machine. Although 486's appear in the benchmarks, they are going to be the souped up models, with the fastest disks and controllers. You also don't say what DBMS you are using, and you don't say how much extra capacity you're looking for. You don't say what bus architecture and disk types you're using on your current system, so it's hard to give any recommendation for a replacement. You should pick the system that is closest to yours from the TPC results. Then, get the Full Disclosure report from them so that you can see the exact configuration. You can also get the benchmark specification to see how similar the TPC application is to yours. Finally, you can just guess. If your only looking for a modest increase in capacity, then any workstation class machine should suffice. If you're running an ISA 486 with an ordinary IDE controller, you can look into staying with a PC class machine, but moving to a faster bus and disk architecture. I hope this has been of some help. Scott Orshan Novell/USL 908-522-5063 sdo@usl.com