Re: Hardware for 200GB+ DB ?

From: Darryl Ramm <darrylr_at_wombat.engr.sgi.com>
Date: 18 Dec 1994 01:00:52 GMT
Message-ID: <3d01k4$2pm_at_fido.asd.sgi.com>


In article <singerap.43.000D72EF_at_powergrid.electriciti.com>, Paul Singer <singerap_at_powergrid.electriciti.com> wrote:
>In article <5Y00H0C.smith117_at_delphi.com> smith117_at_delphi.com writes:
>>From: smith117_at_delphi.com
>>Subject: Re: Hardware for 200GB+ DB ?
 

>>If you are looking for the highest capacity technology,
>>SGI or DEC have the best stuff today.

Thanks for the SGI vote, however I might dispute DEC though and substitute Sequent or a few other vendors depending on what the CPU, I/O and memory capcity requrements where. DEC's OSF/1 scalability is just awfull and it's not clear they are doing much to fix it, OpenVMS is better, but so what the market is elsewhere.

>Oracle just purchased a three way Sequent Cluster for internal development
>user for large databases. I believe that they purchased 500gig of disk with
>this system. My understanding is that they did an evaluation of all the
>platforms that they supported and chose Sequent. If I can find the press
>release I will post it.

I think your probably quoting a little too much Sequent marketing !

The concept of large database companies "purchasing" computers is somewhat flawed. Most systems acquired by Oracle, Informix and Sybase are either donated (loaned) free of charge or provided in return for offset against porting fees or pre-paid royalties. It's interesting to be in these sorts of negotiations to see who can give away the biggest box free of charge, sorry to all you folks who have to pay for your toys ! Sequent is pretty much locked-in as a development system in different groups at Oracle. This *may* be more due to history than any isolated decision that might be made today. Good SMP Oracle and Sequent technology and some common market focus happened around the same time. Maybe one day if Sun produces large scalable systems Oracle could move their development to a more unified development environment. Meanwhile Sequent provides pretty good support to the developers at Oracle and certainly produce good scalable systems than the developers are used to. I doubt that Oracle would be keen to swap around platforms in development, and are probably tired of every other hardware vendor (including SGI ?) trying to shove hardware down their throat.

>I must admint to being a Sequent bigot. HP and DEC make fine equipment also.
>I do not think that database service is SGI's forte.

We do lots of things from supercomputers and database servers to multi-media systems, we also happen to make some pretty good graphics workstation :-)

In terms of large systems, the FBI have announced they will purchase a large Silicon Graphcis/Oracle Parallel Server cluster, starting at 100Gb and going to 600Gb. Boeing, Norcen Energy, Shearson, Telecom New Zealand, and lots of other companies run on Silicon Graphics and Oracle. You might also want to look up our Oracle 7.1 data mining white paper, presents operational and performance information on a ~200Gb Oracle database simulating a real customer marketing database, we did this work with EDS for some of their customers (EDS happen to think we do databases). 37 million customers, 1.3 billion (yes billion with a B) rows of order history, real world 3 way table joins that run using Parallel Query and get really neat scalup on 16CPU's. 16 hours to do a full backup with only 4 tape drives (we could do it in < 4 hours). We have also produced the fastest ever single node Oracle TPC-A at over 2,000tps and that was with our older (150MHz) systems our newer 200MHz could do a lot more.

...and yes I'm a Silicon Graphics database server bigot, but then I'm  paid to do that.

Cheers

Darryl

-- 
Darryl Ramm				Silicon Graphics
Database Marketing Manager		2011 North Shoreline Blvd.
darrylr_at_sgi.com				Mountain View, CA, 94039-1389
voice: (415) 390-2875			fax: (415) 390-6320
Received on Sun Dec 18 1994 - 02:00:52 CET

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