Re: lies damn lies and benchmarks

"Mark Townsend" <markbtownsend_at_attbi.com> wrote in message news:B9012C6F.20FFD%markbtownsend_at_attbi.com...
> in article YqPC8.3$_D5.11748_at_news.uswest.net, Pablo Sanchez at
> pablo_at_dev.null wrote on 5/10/02 5:55 AM:
>
> > Are you the Mark Townsend of Oracle? Why not lobby your TPC-C
> > representatives to make the motion at the -C meeting for the
metric?
> > I think it has a lot of merrit.
>
> One of my more favourite topics, and as I sit next to him, he gets
to hear
> my views almost daily :-)

Heh heh! Poor him. J/K.

> I'd actually like to see a seperate HA benchmark set up, rather than
combine
> it with the TPC-C. Idea would be to set a minimum level of TPS
through which
> all backups need to be made, then introduce a series of common
faults, and
> record the time/cost required to recover and get back to the
prescribed
> throughput levels. Have two levels of faults in the BM - unplanned
events
> (disk crashes etc), and a superset level also including planned
events, such
> as user error, maintenance operations etc. Any remote mirroring etc
would
> need to be able to keep up with the throughput, survive network
outages etc.
>
> There's already been some work done in academia on identifying the
faults
> and building a repeatable framework for fault injection, so it
wouldn't be a
> big step to turn this into a benchmark.It would play well with some
of the
> Oracle features as well - fast recovery, online ops, failover to
warm
> caches, standby, HARD initiative, certified configs etc.
>
> A very useful exercise, and one that would help the industry in a
large way
> - imagine if the hardware vendors and software vendors actually
worked
> together to solve and standardize operations around this little
problem.
>
> Of course, these are my own views, and not necessarily those of
Oracle's.

Understood ... too bad you have to say that ... okay, so let's assume you're _not_ from Oracle since you're posting from attbi.com :) (Also, I apologize for ID'ing you, sorry about that, just the name sounded familiar for some reason ... do you owe me money? <g>)

FWIW, after I posted my note to augment the TPC-C, I started thinking that perhaps it might require a separate BM. Based on what you've written above, it's clear that you have thought about this quite a bit! :) The notion of having a separate BM for HA whose metrics cover items like time to recover X transactions, etc sounds appealing. Well, to me at least.

I'm no longer with a company that is involved with the TPC efforts so I wouldn't be able to lobby this. Guess we have to pound your cube mate. What is his email address? <g>

If you're interested, I'd be more than happy to review any documents that you may have. See .sig for email address.

Thx!

--
Pablo Sanchez, High-Performance Database Engineering
mailto:pablo_at_hpdbe.com
http://www.hpdbe.com
Available for short-term and long-term contracts