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

Pablo Sanchez wrote: > > >>>>> "Paul" == Paul Brown <pbrown@triplerock.Berkeley.EDU> writes: > Paul> > Paul> To quote from Jim Gray, (_Transaction_Processing_:_Concepts_and_ > Paul> Techniques_ pp. 420-21); > Paul> > > Paul, > > Unless something has changed, aren't you still an Informix > employee (or employed in some fashion by them)? If so, then > of course you're going to post supporting literature... > > Anyway, I think the answer lies with the TPC-C. I think > that they prove that row-level vs page-level locking is not > an issue. The -C's are a finely tuned OLTP application. I think we may have drifted into a small tangent here...I think the real question that many developers are interested in (at least consciencious (sp?) ones) is whether or not the page level locking (PLL) concurrency solutions are a hinderance on performance of the application. It is a given, I believe, that RLL is an *easier* model to work with--and IMHO, I think for some simple RAD type applications it is great to have just so you don't need to concern yourself with concurrency as much, which is why I am pleased to see it being added to Sybase. But, the real question is, for the remainder of the applications out there (which are pushing the server to its limits), is there a situation in which a PLL concurrency solution is less efficient than the associated RLL solution? (Note, I am not saying that easier to implement, because it usually isn't). Or, better yet, if you implemented PLL logic in an RLL database, would it help, hinder, or have no effect on performance? I cannot think of any application in which a properly designed PLL solution would perform any worse than its RLL counter part (but, as has been pointed out, it may very well take more design effort to achieve these results). And, in fact, I think that for a very large sub-set of these applications, performance can actually improve using PLL. This is what really gripes me about companies that sell cross- vendor software that does not work effectively in a PLL environment...with just a little bit of effort (which these companies don't seem willing to invest) the application could easily work across any vendor's environment, and may even gain a slight performance improvement. -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