Re: Informix vs. Sybase vs. Oracle vs. (gasp) MS SQL Server

In article <33538a45.29051694_at_news.jax.mindspring.com>, Reid Fleming <RFleming_at_aol.com> wrote:
>Dave Raddatz <raddatz_at_austin.ibm.com> wrote:
>
>>Steve Phelan wrote:
>>
>>I think Larry's referring to the SP machines (mutltiple RS/6000
>>node environment) vs. what you describe as SMP machines (multiple
>>chips in a single box).
>>
>>I believe several DB vendors have written "parallel" versions
>>of their products to take advantage of the SP type machines.
>>
>
>If they have, I would be interested in seeing how they turned out. We
>had one of the first SP2's that we tried using with Sybase System 10.
>Performance was poor; Sybase recommended that we wait until their
>'Navigation Server' became available. We waited for a while, but the
>product, which they were co-developing with NCR (I believe) was
>dropped.

Nope, it wasn't dropped, and is available right now. Only the name was changed, it is currently called Sybase MPP 11.1. I managed to play with it a while ago, and it is quite cool (although, as with *any* clustering system, is pretty hard to maintain). Also, Sybase's future direction with the new Adaptive server architecture is to roll MPP into the Server itself.

>I'm not an internals expert, but several DB vendors in the past have
>spoken of how much more difficult it is to 'parallelize' between
>machines, versus between processors (like Informix, and to a lesser
>extent, Oracle, are able to do). I like the idea of separate boxes,
>and hope that they can make (or have made) this work.

It works, but is a really hard problem (just think of the variables involved with optimization). Now with the hybrid NUMA approach I bet you'll start to see a lot of development in the direction of tuning databases towards a more distriubuted approeach.

Cool stuff.

-scott

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Scott C. Gray                 gray_at_voicenet.com     "my keybard is brken"
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