Re: Oracle Performance

"Joseph Finley" <jfinley_at_webwyse.com> wrote:

>I know a couple programmers using TopSpeed's Clarion and their database
>which is included TPS. I argue daily about the speed of Oracle vs. this
>desktop database. They are in the world of Clarion is the only thing out
>there. Can someone explain to me in detail how Oracle get's it's speed.

It depends on what you are doing. Oracle can solve the "speed" (or performance) problem many different ways.

I would not say that Oracle is many times faster than a competitor database. I would however say it is many times more -flexible-. From the way you physically design the database (using various types of indexes, partitioning, and clustering), to how you implement the physical database (physical file and disk level), to the type of architecture you run it on - from single CPU NT machines, to a 64 CPU SMP (Symetrical Multi Processing) Unix box and a 82 node MPP (Massive Parallel Processing) Unix cluster.

Oracle's strength is its flexibility. And from that, you can achieve incredible performance. Which is why, from personal experience, Oracle can process (aggregate, group by, while joining to other tables) 170+ million rows in a -single- table in less than 90 minutes. Over 30,000 rows per second. And this 11 node Oracle Parallel Server cluster was a baby in comparison to some of the larger Oracle clusters out there (like the one used for data warehousing by British Telecom).

>have shown examples and ran queries based on theirs and it still doesn't
>convice them. They just dont seem to realize the difference between a
>dektop database and a Database Server.

Joseph, I have run into these types before. They have never seen a mainframe. The first comment they asked when seeing the Unix prompt is "but there is no Windows, how can I work with this?". They think that a table with a few millions rows (wow!!) is big. And have no cenceptual understanding of client-server systems. Hell, I've seen Oracle temp tablespaces larger than the biggest database they have ever worked with. Print out this posting and give it to them.

Hey you Clarion guys!! You are stupid nutters that know nothing about real corporate database systems!

;-)
Billy Received on Fri Apr 28 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT