Re: Informix/Sparc/Solaris vs MS SQL Server/Intel/NT40

Gregory Trubetskoy <grisha@thetsn.com> wrote: :Hello everybody! :We have a database on MS SQL Server with about 7,000,000 records in it, :running on NT 4.0 dual pentium 166 128Meg. We don't need too many user :licenses because most of the stuff is done through CGI. We have 30 on :the SQL server. :The database is pretty simple - three main tables in a one-to-many :chain, the biggest, as I said with 7M records. We run a lot of :complicated SQL on it involving sometimes large result sets, all :statistical, simple "data mining" if you will. The database size is :estimated to grow exponentially in the future, by the end of the year :we'll probably have over 20M records. :We are not particularly happy with the performance, and my boss is ready :to shell out some major bucks to buy a dual pentium Compaq with 512Meg :of RAM. (Around $30K) :I have a feeling that switching to Informix on a SPARC would be a much :better scalable, stable and not necessarily a lot more expensive :alternative. My boss sais "Yeah but how much is it going to cost :really?". You may want to compare with the same Compaq runing Informix on Unix (SCO OpenServer or Unixware or even Solaris X86) as well. These have often had very good price performance compared to other alternatives. :We are on the East Coast if that makes any difference... :I would appreciate a discussion based around the following questions: :(I must warn Linux fans eager to comment - sorry, Linux is out of the :question here because there is no Informix or Sybase Linux. Postgres or :msql will not do.) :1. What kind of a SPARC would yield performance equivalent to a dual :P166 (or 200) with 512 Meg. I know that a sparc 10 is technically an :equivalent to a P75, but I know NT 4.0 is next to useless on a P75. :2. Are SPARCS really all that much more expensive than Intel machines :when you're talking high-end, assuming I don't care about a 22' monitor :and amazing graphics (*I* do, my boss doesn't care if I do)? On the TPC/C benchmarks the Sun SPARC machines have traditionally been the once that came out with price/performance comparable to Intel based machines for what that is worth (it may not be much in your situation, but possibly an indication). : How much :cheaper than Sun SPARCS are SPARC clones? :2.1 I heard a lot of people mention 100Mb ethernet in SPARC/Intel flame :wars - what's the deal there? Is it a lot of money on sparcs? :2.2 Would anyone care to give a real quote comparing equally powerful :2xP166 512M and an equivalent SPARC or a clone? (let's say 2x 9Gig of :disk space, mirrored, two disk controllers) You would typically not want to use 9Gig disks if you are after performance on a database applications. A number of smaller disks would give you better performance. Particularly with an Informix database, where you can then partition your data better and fragment tables intelligently if you want to (with a small number of large tables as you have this might increase performance significantly). :2.3 Don't SPARCs retain their value a lot longer than Intel machines? Questionable. Wouldn't that mean the SPARCs aren't developed as fast as the Intel machines are? :3. Isn't NT 4.0 a lot more expensive than Solaris if I look at the :number of licenses? If I understand it correctly, there are *no* "user :licenses" on Solaris? Currently, we need 1 NT and 1 SQL Server user :license for every user, if I understand Microsoft correctly. I don't know about the OS, but there are user licences on the Informix database, although you may find it best to buy an unlimited license. :4. If I were to buy Informix with Netscape's SuiteSpot (1 user license), :how much am I looking to pay for another 29 Informix user licenses? Ask Informix. :5. With respect to comparing Informix to SQL Server, I know everyone :sais it's way faster - is there a URL somewhere I could use to see this :info? The only one I know of is http://www.tcp.org which shows TCP/C results. On NT Informix was faster when they came out with results in October 96, but new results from Microsoft from December 96 shows them faster again. It is however questionable whether these TCP/C results are very significant to your application. With Informix you have a significant advantage in that you can go to a Unix server as you suggest and gain much better performance than anything MS can show. :6. MS SQL Server is a bitch to manage, the MS Enterprise Manager has a :lot of very apparent bugs, and I end up using iSQL for everything I do :for the most part anyway. How managable is informix, and are there :hidden costs there somewhere? Informix is generally very easy to manage. :8. Why is it that sometimes a simple "SELECT * FROM MYTABLE ORDER BY :MYTABLESPRIMARYKEY" would take a long time to run on SQL Server, like it :reindexes the database even though it's the primary index, are there :stupid problems like this on Informix? I haven't come up against any. You still have to be carefull of course. Optimising SQL isn't allways easy whatever database you use. :9. May be I'm missing something - is Informix/SPARC a good choice to :begin with? Oracle I know is prohibitively expensive, and Sybase, which :I imagine is a lot like SQL Server doesn't appeal to me too much. As far :as the platform - it seems sparcs are the best deal in the unix world, I :don't know about SGI (I'd aprreciate some comments), Digital UNIX is :expensive and I don't care about NT on an Alpha (it's still NT). :Informix also comes with bundled with Netscape which we will buy anyway. Sun SPARC machines are one of the primary development machines of Informix, and as such a good choice. From the TCP/C results they also seem to be very good both on performance and price/performance. As Sun is also the originator of Java and doing a lot of other Internet related work they are undoubtably among the best in this connection. You might also want to check into the new Informix Universal Server. Although you might not need it right now, it shows that Informix is far in front of everybody else when it comes to features and functionallity in their database engines. This might be very benefitial down the line. :Thank You so much - please e-mail me as well as post, some postings :never get to my server. :Gregory Trubetskoy Nils.Myklebust@idg.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org