Re: Performance on NT: Oracle vs. SQLServer?

The performance numbers speak for theselves, but the locking bit below is a red herring. Beware the uninformed...

Barry Schader wrote:
>
> Gene Petryk wrote:
> >
> > On 28 Mar 1997 14:28:17 GMT, "Tim Schwallie" <schwatw_at_hpd.abbott.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > >> We're trying to decide between Oracle and SQL server, for a DSS database
 with
> > >> about 200 Meg of data now, but much larger soon (eg 1 Gig). We've got a
 dual
> > >> processor with 128 Meg (but could increase this), running NT 4.0.
> > >>
> > >> I've heard that Oracle doesn't run as fast on NT, as on UNIX. Have any of
 you
> > >> had experience with either/both, or know of performance benchmarks of
 Oracle
> > >> vs. NT??
> >
> > We have been using Oracle for our DSS style application, but its
> > update/insert (data aggregation) performance for larger tables is
> > pathetic. (And it's not a question of memory or disk load) We are
> > looking at SQL Server right now, it's _way_ faster for these
> > operations but it has its problems also.
> >
> > You can see for yourself:
> > create a simple table
> > create table test (fldchar char(30), fldint integer)
> >
> > then insert a row into that table, and run
> > insert into test select * from test
> > a couple of times.
> > I created 16K records, then run a simple update query, say:
> > update test set fldint = 30
> >
> > Oracle v.7.1: 1min 30sec., v.7.3: 45sec.
> > SQL Server: 3sec.
>
> Beware the simplistic benchmark. I ran the above test on my
> Oracle 7.2 / NT 3.51 system and it took less than 9 seconds.
> Also, the COMMIT afterwards is instantaneous. It isn't
> quite in the claimed ballpark for SQL Server, but it's a
> lot better than 45 seconds. (I have to admit that I'm on
> a 233MHz Alpha workstation, but it's not likely to be five
> times faster.)
>
> Although I've had some difficulties with Oracle performance
> for querying, I understand the guts of the system and you
> aren't likely to get a whole lot faster than writing to the
> end of a sequential file, which is all that Oracle does to
> execute and commit a transaction. (Writes to the database
> itself are trickled out later.)
>
> I have no experience with MS SQL Server.
>
> While I have no doubt that MS SQL Server is somewhat faster
> on NT, I have a feeling that the magnitude of the cited performance
> difference may have more to do with differences in configuration
> (recoverable vs. unrecoverable, for example), and perhaps
> the tester's experience, in the two databases.
>
> A couple of consideration for DSS applications:
>
> They tend to be CPU hogs. Be careful about locking yourself into
> a platform (NT) that doesn't scale well above 4 processors (yet).
>
> Oracle provides read-consistency during updates. You can overlap
> long-running updates and long-running queries in Oracle. They
> will not block each other and the result of each query will reflect
> the state of all committed transactions as of the moment when the
> query started (a consistent snapshot). Last I heard, SQL Server
> could not do this -- you'd basically have to lock the whole table
> at the start of a long-running query to guarantee consistency.
> This doesn't do a whole lot for concurrency. Of course, if all
> of your updates occur at off-hours then this isn't a big deal.
>
> Barry Schader
Received on Wed Apr 16 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT