Re: Will a 2nd CPU boost Read Performance - NT/Oracle8

In article <6jbf7g$pcd$1_at_nnrp1.dejanews.com>,   peterwiley_at_hotmail.com wrote:

> I want to improve as far as possible the performance on selects. The machine
> is running NT Server 4 SP3 and Oracle 7.3, soon to go to Oracle 8. Currently
> 128Mb RAM and 18 Gb RAID5 disk in 4x9Gb drives. We're going to double the
RAM
> (because we can cheaply) and replace the disks with 4x18Gb disks mirrored. I
> *can't* easily put on more disks due to physical restrictions; this thing is
> on a ship and space is tight. Database size is somewhat over 6 Gb and
growing
> fast, with 2 very large tables which are indexed for performance.

That's too bad. Because I'd suggest you increase the number of disks as opposed to replacing the existing ones with larger ones. Nowadays, without sophisticated RAID devices (i.e., EMC equipment and the like) the hard drive is a huge bottleneck. You'd be able to better implement parallelism through additional disks. This isn't to say you can't do this with your existing two disks, but not to as great a degree.

> So...is adding a second CPU likely to be worth the effort, considering that
> the write speed is acceptable, but the read speed needs improvement? A
select
> statement may easily fetch a resultset of 240,000 rows (30 days data at 8640
> rows/day).

Absolutely. But not without some work on your part. Parallelism is great, but not as simple as simple as it should be. However, in your case, with only 2 CPU's, you could do a quick modification to your two big tables to include a default parallel clause of 2. With that as a starting point, and the documentation in hand, you should be able to play with things so as to improve performance a decent amount.

> BTW, when, oh when, is Oracle going to get a SQL92 timestamp data type?

Dunno. But you could (with Oracle8) implement such a thing with the object capabilities.

Good luck.

duff

-----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==----- http://www.dejanews.com/ Now offering spam-free web-based newsreading Received on Thu May 14 1998 - 17:19:32 CDT