Re: DB2 Crushes Oracle RAC on TPC-C benchmark

Serge Rielau wrote:

>> The published list price for RAC is $20/proc AFAIK but I have never
>> seen anyone actually pay that price. Here's the calculation I had
>> the procurement folks at a Boeing division do for me last year for
>> a project to the extent that I can divulge the numbers.
>>
>> 2 x 4CPU H/P-Compaq 1U servers $11K
>> 8 x RAC licenses (using the published price) $160K (it was less)
>>
>> total cost $175K with rounding up for miscellaneous items.

> 
> But if one machine fails you risk thrashing the system because it will 
> be 100% overloaded. How does Oracle react when you "exceed" 100% CPU?

Let me suggest that you read the RAC concept books. The straw horse you have cobbled together is only possible in a badly designed system.

But to answer your question it needs to be rephrased. How does the operating system handle hitting 100% CPU? I don't know how does it handle that situation with any software?

>> But the real advantage was that we knew we wouldn't need a
>> forklift in the future. Here's the most important part of the
>> RAC savings.

> 
> You think you don't need a forklift. Let's coem back to this thread in 2 
> years when Boing is running on 5 nodes.

5 1U boxes sitting in a rack? Lets see ... I've personally put together 8 nodes in my lab. Oracle has published numbers on up to 128 nodes. I don't see a forklift in the future. Why do you?

>> Development ... one cluster with 2 nodes.
>> Testing ... one cluster with 2 nodes.
>> Production ... one cluster with 2 nodes initially.

> 
> See with the Sun aproach you could have shared used the idle standby for 
> development and testing (kick the developers out in case of fail over).
> leaves 750k (3 * 250k) facing 750k. Earlier it was stated that
> Unix servers are /cpu more powerful...

Not to be rude here but perhaps you'd like to borrow a book I have on best practices. You don't kick the developers out that are supporting a production release. You give them as close as possible a duplicate environment. Especially when the cost of doing so is so reasonable.

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
University of Washington
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace 'x' with 'u' to respond)