Re: tough choices

From: Michael Austin <maustin_at_firstdbasource.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 15:47:07 GMT
Message-ID: <%1jAc.6836$yz.6747@newssvr22.news.prodigy.com>

Sy Borg wrote:

> Daniel Morgan <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu> wrote in message news:<1087421232.498660_at_yasure>...
>
>

>>The "bottleneck" you have identified is only a problem if you don't
>>obtain the proper hardware. The number of transactions, and volume,
>>going through an HBA to a storage device is not related to RAC versus
>>federated data. Buy the right hardware and there is no issue.

>
>
> Thank you Daniel. Please pardon my ignorance - my background is
> software development. I have one further question - does this mean
> that we need to recommend an upfront investment in a super fast
> network and storage hardware to our customers? In other words, when
> the oracle guys make the scalability claim for their database
> clusters, are they saying that - sure you can scale your system up and
> add many more processor nodes - but make sure you spend the big bucks
> on the network and storage right now because if you don't and add more
> nodes in the future - your network and storage hardware might not be
> able to handle the volume.
>
>

>>The main consideration I would think would be the overhead of federating
>>data for DB2. The more data the more difficult and time consuming and
>>the fact that losing nodes with RAC is an inconvience ... with DB2 you
>>have a lot more to worry about ... and mean time between failures goes 
>>down, not up, as you add nodes.

and to put it another way... your scalability will only be as scalable as your slowest technology (disk, controller, HBA, cpu, bus, memory, network infrastructure, SAN infrastructure etc...)

We can only give you so much advice with the information provided, so our suggestions will only go so far.

If you are talking hundreds of transactions an hour versus hundreds per minute, the scale is vastly different and choice of hardware and database can vary with each -- and this can vary with the size of each transaction as well. You don't put in a single-processor Windows server to achieve thousands per minute rate. (I wouldn't even consider that for my guestbook with 10 hits a year, but that's just me :) )

As always, YMMV.

Michael Austin. Received on Thu Jun 17 2004 - 10:47:07 CDT