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RE: floating point and Sun T2000

From: Kevin Closson <kevinc_at_polyserve.com>
Date: Fri, 5 May 2006 10:22:07 -0700
Message-ID: <5D2570CAFC98974F9B6A759D1C74BAD06FEA13@ex2.ms.polyserve.com>


>>>> >>>I'm testing a Sun T2000 Solaris 10 Oracle 10g and have
>>>read that if
>>>> >>>floating point calculations are used then the box is
>>>essentially a
>>>> >>>1 cpu box.
>>>>
>>>> the database server does not do floating point calculations

...The question implied a scalability concern, right? My point is that the engine does not have FP underpinnings for scalability. You know, those things that happen, uh, like millions of times per second like spinlocks, dba hashing, chain walks, etc. Of course I know about things like BINARY_FLOAT and BINARY_DOUBLE datatypes, but I can't see how these could ever be used to the point of rendering poor scalability. Every time one of these data types is touched it is preceded by myriads of integer ops. Tell me if I'm wrong by all means.

I know one thing for certain, we should all be glad the server doesn't use floating point and that the NUMBER datatype is the way it is, because that nasty little floating point bug in the pentium processor back in the late 90s would have been a REAL pill to swallow. Come to think of it, these new 10g datatypes would have been really freaky on those buggy pentiums :-)

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Received on Fri May 05 2006 - 12:22:07 CDT

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