Distributed,Parallel, and ConText

Currently trying to weigh the pros and cons of a parallel versus distributed setup. I am leaning towards a distributed setup since we will be running under NT, and I do not believe that NT supports non-shared disks. Since we will be doing large nightly loads of data, I/O bottlenecks could result. The need for a distributed or parallel system arises for performance and load reasons. The application is a basic read-only data warehousing application with a few tables of between 30 - 70 million records (one of the larger tables being searched by ConText.) The tables can easily be divided into smaller symmetrical subsets. The tables need to have nightly updates (up to 1 - 2 million) and on not to infrequent basis (the data is not ours to be responsible for) full loads and indexing must be performed. Currently we are implementing a single db on VMS, and it doesn't look like it will be able to keep up.

Any input is appreciated.

Additionally i was wondering about the parsing of ConText SQL statements. If a distributed system was implemented with a partitioned view linking the divided tables and an SQL call was made such as : SELECT name from view_name
WHERE deptno = '123' OR

              deptno = '456'
AND CONTAINS (name,'MURPH') > 0 ;

where the view_name is defined as:
SELECT * from tab1_at_db1 WHERE deptno = '123' UNION ALL
SELECT * from tab1_at_db2 WHERE deptno = '456' UNION ALL ..etc

will the CONTAINS( ) function be passed to the remote ConText server for the processing to be done there or will the results be returned to the local ConText server for processing. The ConText documentation says that the SQL statement will be picked up by ConText while in the query queue, but I don't know if this is before or after the broken down SQL has been distributed.

Thanks for the help, Richard Murphy. Received on Fri Jan 15 1999 - 16:59:47 CST