Re: ORACLE V.S. INGRES

giusto_at_torino.maraut.it (Paolo Giusto) writes:

>Hi there,
>Could someone please tell me if articles about INGRES v.s. ORACLE exist?
>I would like to answer this question: " Is it better INGRES than ORACLE? "
 

>Thanks in advance
 

>PAOLO GIUSTO
>MARELLI AUTRONICA
>MAGNETI MARELLI ELECTRONIC DIVISION
>TURIN - ITALY
I don't know about articles, only my personal experiences on following platforms:
DECStation 5000/Ultrix 4.1 (Oracle V6.0.30/Ingres 6.3) SCO Unix (Oracle 6.0.31/Ingres 6.3)
ICL DRS/6000/Unix Sys.Vr4 (Oracle 6.0.31/Ingres 6.3) (and Oracle on several other platforms)

When you look at the specifications Ingres looks like a superior RDBMS over Oracle. It has some quite nice features, that Oracle doesn't have (distribution, cost based query optimizer, etc). However, in real world things get quite different. Here are some aspects

1. Performance All other things being similar (harware, OS, system load, database...) Oracle seems to be at least 2 times faster. Our benchmarks gave Oracle 2 to 100 times faster timings. Ingres' technical support considered Ingres' results "quite good". We didn't ask Oracle's opinion... It looks like Oracle's well optimized disk I/O does much better job than Ingres's query optimizer.
2. Reliability If you want to use Ingres you'd better have UPS and very stable applications. If an application terminates violently (kill -9 or core dump or something other than normal disconnect), Ingres can't release locks held by this application until you shut Ingres down. Moreover, in SCO Unix Ingres can't release shared memory it has allocated. If you have to restart Ingres, it allocates new shared memory blocks while not releasing the old ones. Eventually you have to reboot the computer to start Ingres (or any other application that allocates shared memory). If Ingres terminates violently (electrical failures, system panic, etc) it trashes system databases. You may be able to reconstruct them but as well you might have to re-install Ingres. Also I have heard (not experienced personally) about situations where Ingres trashes its databases under normal operations. The only thing to do after that was to re-install Ingres. None of the above aspects causes any harm to Oracle. Only reliability problems I've experienced with Oracle are in the use of Import and Export facilities. They both ask a fetch buffer size. If it isn't identical in both Import and Export, you have a great possibility to trash Oracles system database (this happened under Ultrix with ORACLE RDBMS V6.0.30.3.1); re-installation of Oracle was the only known cure.
3. Ease of administration In general, Ingres is easier to set up but requires much more administration under production than Oracle. To retain acceptable performance with Ingres you have to run some optimization programs once in a while (at least once in a week). Oracle doesn't need this kind of administration.

Olli Mikkonen

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Olli Mikkonen		: Any opinions above are purely my personal ones.
Internet: 		: Especially they do not reflect my employers
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