Re: Sybase vs Oracle - which is better?

I would tend to disagree that row level locking is only for "badly written" applications.
An example from a previous job would be a Point of Sale system. In one department of this application would be preparing and shipping out equipment.
Every morning new work would get loaded into the system by a batch process. Workers would then work this data to get it shipped out the door. Since the data is loaded in by
a batch process it is put into the same data blocks. Since we had a 4K block size and the average
row length is around 200 bytes we would have around 200 rows inside one block. I'm not sure how small your page locks could go but if I locked 200 different orders, remembering that since the data is all residing pretty much together I just put a major choke hold on the work flow for this process. Once this equipment is shipped out the help desk would tend to get more calls on the new clients and newly shipped pieces of equipment. Once again this data is pretty much grouped together in the database. If each helpdesk rep locked a couple of hundred rows when they are updating a client's information that would mean that other help desk reps would have to wait until they can do the same.

So I guess I'm wondering how Sybase would deal with this problem and how small can a page lock be?

regards

Carl Christianson

kennedyleigh_at_yahoo.com wrote:

> The main reason Oracle does so well is that many Packages (eg: SAP,
> Peoplesoft) are badly written cobol apps which use cursors for everything.
> Sybase had a religous was with SAP over row level locking and oracle got very
> rich because of it.
>
> Cheers,
> LK.
>
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Received on Thu Nov 19 1998 - 00:00:00 CST