Re: Performance problems with really big tables

In article <36751654.26697826_at_bart.inescn.pt>,   Marco Ribeiro <mar_at_bart.inescn.pt> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We've got two tables with more than 6 million records in each one and
> performance deteriorates as they grow, can anyone give some advice on
> improving the performance of operations on these tables.
>
> Also is it more eficient to have a surrogate key or a compund key ?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Marco Ribeiro
>
>

There are two things to do:

1. Optimize all your access paths so that full table scan is a rare event.
2. For really big tables, you need a really big iron, so don't hesitate to suggest a purchase of SUN E10000, HP T600, SGI ORIGIN2000 or something really big. If the tables grow monumental, then you should consider something like SP2, which is a true MPP and can handle an exceptional load. Don't go for Intel based servers. as Intel is the only one that cannot handle 64 bit addressing, and VLM option is a must in a situation like this. Other expenses involved with a machine so big are Legato Networker, DLT stacker or two, FCAL based RAID (with lots of non-volatile RAM, for performance), a good tuning tool (QUEST's SQL Lab is a brilliant product), a very good DBA to handle all that stuff and at least silver support form Oracle Corp. Or, you can entrust yourself to Microsoft and configure a really huge NT cluster in which case you better make sure that God is on your side. You'll need all of the above in that case as well.

--
Mladen Gogala

-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own Received on Tue Dec 15 1998 - 22:45:07 CST