Re: lies damn lies and benchmarks

"Nuno Souto" <nsouto_at_optushome.com.au.nospam> wrote in message news:3cd8f1c4$0$15474$afc38c87_at_news.optusnet.com.au...
> In article <3cd8ee4e$0$232$ed9e5944_at_reading.news.pipex.net>, you said
> (and I quote):
> >
> > I bet it knows exactly how to do it. Intellectual Property can stifle as
> > well as stimulate competition, and if Oracle doesn't have the
rollback/undo
> > mechanism tied up tightly in IP then I'm a banana.
>
>
> actually, rollback and undo is as old as databases. The old codasyl ones
> already had the same mechanism. Exactly the same way. I find it hard
> to believe that Oracle can claim IP on that. They can claim IP on how
> they implemented it in their database, but the mechanism itself is quite
> old. It was accurately described long before relational existed and
> Chris Date also described it in detail in one of his books.

Bugger. I appear to be a banana.

>
>
> > In fact one of the value arguments in favour of RAC is that you can
> > duplicate expensive sun kit functinality on cheap compaq hardware.
>
>
> Compaq is no more. Or was that the DEC VAX cluster? I wish this
> industry stopped the takeover mania for a couple of years. Just so that
> we can all collectively catch up with exactly which technology is the
> industry standard of the week...

well OK HP then but you know what I mean.
>
>
> > Can Oracle? What operating system would that be running on and how many
> > oracle patches are you applying per year. ever changed an itit.ora
> > parameter. What about power or network work in the server room that
> > necessitates downtime? FWIW all my Oracle systems have mean time between
> > reboots of less than 90 days over the last year. In 80% of cases that
> > downtime was due to external circumstances not connected with the
database
> > platform.
>
>
> Hmmmmmm. I've just looked today at a production instance that has been
> running non-stop since January 2001. V8.0 for good measure too. ;-)

no patches applied during that time? And clearly no upgrades.

>
>
> > MSSQL is a serious competitor in this market and not just because MS
> > marketing is better than Oracle marketing. They are pushing a good
product.
> >
>
> Doubt it. The good product bit. Only reason people use it is because MS
> makes it so easy and cheap to use in NT. Nothing else.

Easy,cheap, does the job. sounds like a good product to me. One could argue that people only use Oracle because it scales to multi-terabyte partitioned clustered solutions for 100,000 employee companies. then it gets used to serve a product catalogue on a web site with ten thousand visits a year.

--
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
Audit Commission UK
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