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

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. >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. Cool stuff. -scott -- Scott C. Gray gray@voicenet.com "my keybard is brken" Sybase Professional Services scott.gray@sybase.com http://www.voicenet.com/~gray/sqsh.html