Re: HP or Sun for Oracle

In article <781852347snz_at_sambusys.demon.co.uk>

           psb_at_sambusys.demon.co.uk "Paul Beardsell" writes:
> I'm intrigued: Is this simply the first reason that pops into your head
> or, as a Sun employee, do you yourself have reason to examine Oracle
> source.
Sounds credible to me - I've been working in System Software development until very recently (for a Unix and Mainframe platform supplier).

> The reasoning behind my scepticism is as follows: Oracle, to be portable,
> will be using POSIX calls (almost?) exclusively. Sun will provide all of
> the POSIX interface and should _already_ be concentrating on the performance
> of each of them. There is little that Sun can do to improve the performance
> of one POSIX call at the _expense_ of the performance of another. So
> they should just get ahead and do the tuning enhancements without reference
> Oracle.
No, Oracle probably isn't just using POSIX - they will have conditional compilation for each platform or possibly versions of low level libraries that they write to assist with porting. Anyway, there are usually 2 or 3 ways to do anything so Sun can advise on the best one to pick.

> Consider also the characteristics of the Oracle application from the
> point of view of the Operating System. I'm not suggesting that Oracle
> is not a sophisticated, complicated product but from the point of view
> of the OS it is simply reading and writing bytes to and from files and
> to and from the network and to and from shared memory. There is _nothing_
> unusual about Oracle in comparison to other applications when looked at
> at this low level.
Well, not many applications need as much optimisation or machine level knowledge as Oracle (consider raw filesystem handling alone).

Eoin.

-- 
Eoin Woods, LBMS Plc, Evelyn House, 62 Oxford Street, London W1N 9LF, UK
            Tel: +44-71-636-4213  Email: Eoin_at_copse.demon.co.uk
            Fax: +44-71-66-2708      or  E.Woods_at_ieee.org
          "When do we start newsgroup comp.os.emacs ? :-)"
      These are my opinions - don't blame my employer for them!