Re: Performance on NT: Oracle vs. SQLServer?

Gene Petryk wrote:
>
> On 28 Mar 1997 14:28:17 GMT, "Tim Schwallie" <schwatw_at_hpd.abbott.com>
> wrote:
>
> >> We're trying to decide between Oracle and SQL server, for a DSS database
 with
> >> about 200 Meg of data now, but much larger soon (eg 1 Gig). We've got a
 dual
> >> processor with 128 Meg (but could increase this), running NT 4.0.
> >>
> >> I've heard that Oracle doesn't run as fast on NT, as on UNIX. Have any of
 you
> >> had experience with either/both, or know of performance benchmarks of
 Oracle
> >> vs. NT??
>
> We have been using Oracle for our DSS style application, but its
> update/insert (data aggregation) performance for larger tables is
> pathetic. (And it's not a question of memory or disk load) We are
> looking at SQL Server right now, it's _way_ faster for these
> operations but it has its problems also.
>
> You can see for yourself:
> create a simple table
> create table test (fldchar char(30), fldint integer)
>
> then insert a row into that table, and run
> insert into test select * from test
> a couple of times.
> I created 16K records, then run a simple update query, say:
> update test set fldint = 30
>
> Oracle v.7.1: 1min 30sec., v.7.3: 45sec.
> SQL Server: 3sec.

Beware the simplistic benchmark. I ran the above test on my Oracle 7.2 / NT 3.51 system and it took less than 9 seconds. Also, the COMMIT afterwards is instantaneous. It isn't quite in the claimed ballpark for SQL Server, but it's a lot better than 45 seconds. (I have to admit that I'm on a 233MHz Alpha workstation, but it's not likely to be five times faster.)

Although I've had some difficulties with Oracle performance for querying, I understand the guts of the system and you aren't likely to get a whole lot faster than writing to the end of a sequential file, which is all that Oracle does to execute and commit a transaction. (Writes to the database itself are trickled out later.)

I have no experience with MS SQL Server.

While I have no doubt that MS SQL Server is somewhat faster on NT, I have a feeling that the magnitude of the cited performance difference may have more to do with differences in configuration (recoverable vs. unrecoverable, for example), and perhaps the tester's experience, in the two databases.

A couple of consideration for DSS applications:

They tend to be CPU hogs. Be careful about locking yourself into a platform (NT) that doesn't scale well above 4 processors (yet).

Oracle provides read-consistency during updates. You can overlap long-running updates and long-running queries in Oracle. They will not block each other and the result of each query will reflect the state of all committed transactions as of the moment when the query started (a consistent snapshot). Last I heard, SQL Server could not do this -- you'd basically have to lock the whole table at the start of a long-running query to guarantee consistency. This doesn't do a whole lot for concurrency. Of course, if all of your updates occur at off-hours then this isn't a big deal.

Barry Schader Received on Thu Apr 10 1997 - 00:00:00 CEST