Re: Oracle slower than MS Access?

I would say the best features of Oracle are safety and security/privacy. Oracle pays a price by enforcing security and logging everything for recovery purposes. ODBC significantly slows things down. Native drivers are generally preferred. Also, nothing can compete with a local process on a local drive. The bottom line: If you have a lot of data and don't want to lose it or don't want it published on the internet by a disgruntled employee, there is a price. And, part of that price is having a DBA that can tune Oracle and use it's tools for the range of tasks it provides to a company.

In article <36133A23.3D679CD7_at_tat.dk>,
  jan <jan_at_tat.dk> wrote:
> Ric Gibson wrote:
>
> > I'm experiencing a surprising performance discrepancy between Oracle and
> > Access.
> >
> > I have a VB app that writes records to a database. It writes an SQL string
> > such as "INSERT INTO MyTable VALUES('BLAH', 'BLAH', 'BLA'.....);
> >
> > No triggers, no stored procedures, nothing fancy, just a simple INSERT
> > query. The data is coming from a flat file parsed into records by my VB code
> >
>
> [snip, snip....]
>
> > Now here's where the confusion lies. when I run this app against an Oracle
> > database it will insert about 2,000 records per minute on average over the
> > course of 400,000 records. When I run it against a MS Access database, it
> > will insert about 5,000 records per minute !!! Can this right right ?!?
> > Everything else is identical, both tests were performed on the same machine
> > using the same data under the same conditions.
> >
> > I'm hoping somebody will tell me that I'm doing something wrong as I can't
> > believe that Oracle is intrinsically that much slower than Access.
>
> Several things. Firstly, when you use VB, you probably use ODBC as well.
> This is one bottleneck in itself - ODBC tries to translate desktop database
> functionality to real, transaction based functionality, and it doesn't perform
> very well.
>
> Secondly, Oracle can be tuned in many ways, and it probably isn't optimized
> for speed in your installation.
>
> Thirdly, Oracle and other all purpose SQL databases are not made with speed
> as the primary goal. In my view performance of a database is also something
> about reliability, scalability and other factors as well. And the biggest
> strength
> of them all, when we're talking about Oracle: portability. Basically, there's
no
>
> difference in administration and programming, whether you use a Personal
> Oracle for Win95 or an Enterprise Server for a mainframe, except for those
> inherent in the machine architectures or OSes.
>
> If you want to improve your data load, use eg. SQLload, which is Oracle's
> standard tool for that. According to some, the performance difference between
> accessing Oracle via ODBC and directly through SQLNet is a factor 10 to 15!
> So you should actually be loading 20000 records per minute.
>
> /jan
>
>

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