Re: Which platform is better?

Here is my humble opinion, which is based on empirical evidence.

At my previous job we benchmarked our product on Oracle7.3.x and Oracle8.1.x on NT and SPARC Solaris. The NT box was configured very similar to your spec, except 1Gb ram and 4 SCSI drives non-RAIDed (about a $10K box or so). The Sun box was an older E250 with 500 Mb memory, 4 non-RAIDed SCSI drives, and dual 400 MHz SPARC processors (about a $30K box). The databases where configured the same, OFA-compliant, same SGA sizing (or better on the NT box), the NT box had one Oracle instance, and the Sun box had 3 Oracle instances + ClearCase running on it. The schema including tables, indexes, and data were exactly the same. Even the execution plans for the 10 or so queries I examined were exactly the same.

Guess what, the Sun box ran all operations (including the big-read DSS type queries) 6-7 times faster. Do the math, and you'll see where the money is well-spent.

I've only worked with RS-6000's and AIX once, and it was a pretty old box, but I would tend to agree with the earlier posting: run, don't walk, away from NT.

Best regards,
Dave

Paul R. Johnson <pjohnson_at_take.this.out.spasydell.net> wrote in message news:8nulgtkn24li454dfib8jhaqvhn2lkkn9g_at_4ax.com...
> I currently am running Oracle 7.3.4 on AIX 4.3.1.0. We have this on a
> 3 processor 333mhz RS/6000 with 1gb ram. We a having occasional
> problems with performance, but nothing too bad. We are running a
> Point of Sale and scheduling application from Windows Terminal Server.
> There are usually 80-100 concurrent users on the system with only
> about half of them banging on it.
>
> Our lease is up on the RS/6000 and we are considering 2 options:
>
> 1. Have an AIX expert audit the system for performance and add
> memory, disks, etc as necessary. Then have an Oracle DBA do the same.
> I am currently using a contract DBA. I think that we can get more out
> of this machine.
>
> 2. Buy an new NT/2000 server. This is where I would know what I was
> talking about and able to make recommendations. I am looking at a
> dual Xeon 700mhz/1mb cache, 2+gb ram, 8 9gb hard drives configured for
> RAID 10. This should be a speedy box.
>
> We are probably going to migrate to 8.x in the near future. Which is
> better for the oracle version that we have now and the future?
>
> Thanks for your help,
>
> Paul
>
>
> Paul R. Johnson
> IT Manager
> Spa Sydell
> pjcace at yahoo dot com
>
Received on Sat Jul 21 2001 - 16:07:07 CDT