THE PEPSI CHALLENGE!!! (of dB's)

Dear Oracle Gurus all over the world,

You all sound pretty knowledgable on Oracle stuff.....I'm wondering if you might be able to help me with a couple of quick lines of advice or point me in the direction where I can find out what I need. (pls respond to pbaddock_at_hotmail.com)

Here's the scenario:

dB which needs the following characteristics

12 Million Records
(around 9 residential million names, addresses, phone numbers and 3 million
business names, addresses, phone numbers, and business industry classifications)

30 - 50 enquiries per second (and growing)
(complex text retrieval type enquiries such as surname="bloggs" + initials =
"p" + street name = "champion" + locality + "newtown" or.....busname = "joes plumbing" + industry code = "plumbers" + locality = "newtown")

...and combinations of complex and simple retrievals of this type.....(ie Directory of People and businesses)

Here's the problem:

To accurately spec a hardware config which will assure the kind of performance required. Before you all volunteer a suggestion of me looking at the Oracle site - I've perused this till I'm blue in the face. I have only been able to find "official" TPC-C style benchmarks with little if any mention of hardware specifics particularly as deployed with a certain number of database entries / records.

Maybe I'm blind - or just looking in the wrong place, but if anyone can help or point me in the right direction - I would be grateful. Incidentally, I have spoken very briefly to Oracle on this topic who gave me a fairly non-descript disclaimer about not being able to committ to performance characteristics in particular application environments.

Obviously - its a pretty tough ask, but if people could even share their experiences in a couple of lines
ie "I've run 20 million on Oracle 7.x with 50 concurrent users doing 2 enquiries per minute on average with text searching on records on a DEC Alpha XYZ spec. etc etc"

• that would be useful info for me in trying to figure out just what Oracle can and can't do. I'm supposed to be talking to an Oracle gun next week - but would be very interested to hear from Oracle guns the world over!!!!

Thanks in advance.

Phil Baddock
pbaddock_at_hotmail.com Received on Thu Jan 28 1999 - 02:12:41 CST