Re: Informix vs. Sybase vs. Oracle vs. (gasp) MS SQL Server

In article <5j6eju$h25@omni2.voicenet.com>, gray@voicenet.com (Scott Gray) wrote: > > In article <33538a45.29051694@news.jax.mindspring.com>, > Reid Fleming <RFleming@aol.com> wrote: > >Dave Raddatz <raddatz@austin.ibm.com> wrote: > > > >>Steve Phelan wrote: > >> > >>I think Larry's referring to the SP machines (mutltiple RS/6000 > >>node environment) vs. what you describe as SMP machines (multiple > >>chips in a single box). > >> > >>I believe several DB vendors have written "parallel" versions > >>of their products to take advantage of the SP type machines. > >> > > > >If they have, I would be interested in seeing how they turned out. We > >had one of the first SP2's that we tried using with Sybase System 10. > >Performance was poor; Sybase recommended that we wait until their > >'Navigation Server' became available. We waited for a while, but the > >product, which they were co-developing with NCR (I believe) was > >dropped. > > Nope, it wasn't dropped, and is available right now. Only > the name was changed, it is currently called Sybase MPP 11.1. > I managed to play with it a while ago, and it is quite cool > (although, as with *any* clustering system, is pretty hard > to maintain). Also, Sybase's future direction with the new > Adaptive server architecture is to roll MPP into the Server > itself. > Oracle's product is Oracle Parallel Server (OPS), and Informix's product is Informix XPS. I only have direct experience with OPS, which is a nightmare on MPP systems such as the SP2. My understanding is that it is much better on clustered SMP systems. I have heard that Informix's XPS product is really nice, and I have a vague memory of seeing an Informix benchmark against Oracle and Sybase benchmarks on the SP2 in which Informix was clearly the winner. Does anyone have more information about how this product differs from Oracle or Sybase? > >I'm not an internals expert, but several DB vendors in the past have > >spoken of how much more difficult it is to 'parallelize' between > >machines, versus between processors (like Informix, and to a lesser > >extent, Oracle, are able to do). I like the idea of separate boxes, > >and hope that they can make (or have made) this work. > > It works, but is a really hard problem (just think of the variables > involved with optimization). Now with the hybrid NUMA approach > I bet you'll start to see a lot of development in the direction > of tuning databases towards a more distriubuted approeach. > Database solutions for MPP are not really marketed as being high-performing, scaleable solutions. They are marketed as solutions for high-availability. If you think about the problems and overhead associated with say 30 servers all responsible for one data bed, and moving data between memory on the servers, it quickly becomes clear that the administrative overhead would have to be extremely large. Latency between memory on servers in an MPP configuration is a real problem. Not to mention the human administrative factor - 30 operating systems and 30 copies of database software. It's a complete nightmare. And the DBMS needs to know at all times who has what where. The only real performance advantage one would have with an MPP system is the complete removal of backplane limitations. When you can just keep adding boxes, backplane problems disappear. So it is scaleable, in a sense. The big boy hardware vendors are now all attempting to combine SMP and MPP together in some way. So now we're seeing future plans like clustered SMP systems with fiber between the boxes, or some NUMA-like MPP systems with "memory" connectivity between boxes (I still don't see how that would work). The bottom line is that existing MPP solutions are not very robust. My impression is that we'll see a lot of clustered SMP in the future, unless they come up with some way to improve upon the performance you get with a lot of shared memory on one big SMP box. Brenda -------------------==== Posted via Deja News ====----------------------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Post to Usenet