Re: DBMS Selection for 500+GB data and 500+ Users

I give you some tips as well as some shameless self promotion and also provide you with an unsolicited testimonial from a well rested DBA. ;) I have done 500+GB data warehouses with Sybase and Oracle. Sybase isn't a contender for any large database. Oracle is a worthy opponent, but is missing some key elements. Scalability, availability and managability will be your key issues. You should take a look at what the Gartner Group has to say on the Data Warehouse market. You can guess that it's good for Informix. Consider product futures... Oracle and Sybase are re-architecting their RDBMS kernels to allow for the core parallel architecture. Playing catch up! Since your DW is going to be big, you must carefully consider the disk i/o factors. Informix is the only solution to have a data partitioning feature which is critical to address performance in the large databases. Don't be sucked in to oversizing the hardware. Oracle will tell you that the only way to scale that large is with an MPP system. Funny that I've done it with Oracle on large SMP systems from Sun and outperformed MPP. This is due to inherent limitations from using a Distrubuted Lock Manager (DLM) which causes excessive disk i/o while trying to maintain cache consistency. That's some food for thought on scalability. Read below for a testimonial to managability. -- //////////////// Mark Sigler ////////// // Client Services Engineer ////// / /// Informix Software, Inc. ///// // //// 8675 Hidden River Parkway TBD //// // ///// Tampa, FL 33637 Fort Lauderdale, FL /// // ////// Voice: 813.971.0010 407.883.9319 // // /////// Fax: 813.632.9582 407.883.9319 / /////////// Voicemail: 800.688.4217 x2147 407.883.9319 //////////////// Email: msigler@informix.com WWWeb: http://www.informix.com -- > > We are in the process of selecting a database for our data warehouse. It is > expected to start at 50GB of data with 50+ users and grow over the next 2 > years to be 500+GB of data and 500+ users. Much of the data will be obtained > from our IBM mainframe ADABAS operational databases on a daily basis. We > are looking at Sybase, Informix and Oracle. Does anyone have experiences > (good or bad) that might help with our decision. In particular, how do > these products scale throught this type of growth. Thanks > >> From: jcantu@its.bldrdoc.gov >> Subject: Re: Oracle vs Informix?? >> Date: Wed, 5 Apr 1995 15:16:04 GMT >> Reply-To: jcantu@its.bldrdoc.gov >> Organization: NTIA/ITS >> snip... >> As for the rest, it would depend on alot more than the information you provide >> here, but I will give you my personnal view on the subject. I have about 3 >> years experience with Informix and about four months (current) with Oracle. >> First, Oracle products, services, and support are typically more expensive than >> most RDBMSs; including Informix. It seams to me that if you are planning a more >> localized and/or mission critical database application and/or if you want >> fairly straight forward database administration that you would use Informix 6.0 >> and above (stay away from Informix 5.0 and earlier versions because they have a >> nasty adjacent row-locking problem.) Oracle seams to be a tougher RDBMS to >> administrate; Oracle does everything by files: control files, table space, >> administration, logs, etc. Informix, on the other hand, does everything in a >> specially allocated area of physical diskspace, pretty much handles alot of the >> administration internally, and has easy to use administrative utilities and >> documentation that is exceptional to anything I've seen or read on Oracle. If, >> on the other hand, you can invest in a good Oracle DBA (yes, it's not just the >> product itself that is costly) and don't mind the database going down more >> often than say Informix would, Oracle is great in terms of portability, user >> interfaces, features, and client/server environments. Oracle seems to have a >> larger more complex product line than Informix: Oracle seems to have a product >> to do just about anything on any platform and they'll try to get you to buy >> them all! So, there you have it. ...snip