Re: Why doesn't Oracle care about Linux as IBM does?

Funny thing is: It's not any DBMS vendor's job to define the vocabulary.... For all intents and purposes (let's not get into different meanings of an "instance" between different DBMS's here) I would suggest that we can settle for a "single view and a single product" I.e. the DB Admin should see only on database.

one create database command,
one create table command,
one load command to load data into a table ....
In short no differences in DML or DDL required compared to non clustered. No difference in transaction processing compared to non clustered. No awareness of the application of where it is connected to (or might be migrated to on the fly).

Yes, DB2 supports this since PE days (before DB2 V5).

I'll happily join in in bashing M$ though :-) They are building a federated DBMS when they are running TPC-C. They need to create tables on each node (which would match partitions) and then create a UNION ALL view on top of it on each node.

The options of clustering DB2 for high availablily (on top or in constrast to scalability) have been described by another person in this thread.

It is widely known that Oracle has a different approach to parallelism (shard disk) than DB2 UDB, Informix, Teradata (shared nothing). That doesn't make one clustered and the others not. It's a differenet approach. That's all.

DB2 leaves you the choice between having the node that went down being replaced by another node which participates in active computing (in which case workload goes up for that node which is what Larry likes to rub on, while is gets distributed on Oracle (what happens if you have used partitioning on Oracle, btw?)) or by an idle node. Note that with the software available today (e.g. on AIX) your cost for the idle node would be 1/32 (one failover node dedicated to 32 active ones) of the hardware costs + the clustering softare (which you also need for Oracle).

This seems like a good bargain considering that you can (and customers do) scale out a lot higher in return compared to being limited by the clustering software which Oracle needs to support shared disk on top of the overhead of the lock manager.

Two different approaches, both with up and downsides, no question about it. Keeps my job interesting.
Cheers
Serge Received on Wed Aug 15 2001 - 08:35:33 CDT