Re: DB2 Crushes Oracle RAC on TPC-C benchmark

"Mark Townsend" <markbtownsend_at_comcast.net> wrote in message news:eNednbMcDPvgmmHcRVn-oA_at_comcast.com...
> Ah well, now that _is_ an interesting question. And it's a difficult one
> (for me) to answer.
>
> Some of the largets hardware vendors seem to be OK showing that clusters
> of their low cost hardware can scale for OLTP. For instance, HP did a
> very good 1x64 SMP benchmark and then followed that up with a 16x4 RAC
> benchmark, which was significantly cheaoper, for which they should be
> congratulated. It shows dedication to both architectures, and offers
> customers choice. Open systems at it's finest.
>
> If you are truley interested in the concept of low cost scalable cluster
> arhcitectures, why don't you ask IBM what their strategy is to support
> this type of solution for their customers, and then post an answer back
> to the newsgroup. Given their SP/2 experiences, I'm sure they have
> considered this long and hard, and have some valuable insight.
>

There is a big difference between the SP2 and RAC. The IBM SP2 (or more accurately, DB2 partitioned databases) works exceptionally well for decision support databases, and they work fairly well for OLTP, but they do not provide for the same level of high availability provided by RAC.

But neither of these architectures alone, can provide continuous avaialbity needed by some of today's applications.

DB2 has released version 8.2 which has some high availability and disaster recovery enhancements (HADR) but still falls short of anything close to continuous avaialbity. I think this an issue that many DB2 and Oracle customers are grappling with. Received on Sat Jan 29 2005 - 16:13:49 CST