Re: Personal Oracle7 Slow

From: Steve Macdonald <smacdonl_at_toronto.cbc.ca>
Date: 9 Feb 1995 17:38:22 GMT
Message-ID: <3hdjue$ptr_at_relay.tor.hookup.net>

tcking_at_usit.net (Timothy King) wrote:

> I've noticed that performance of Personal Oracle7 borders on
> the unacceptable for even primary key lookups on small tables.
> I'm running it on a 486DX2 with 16 meg. RAM and 16 meg swapfile.

It became apparent to me very quickly that 16 Mb is an absolute minimum for running PO7. There is a difference between the "Oracle 7 & SQLPlus" and the "Oracle 7, No SQLPlus" configurations however, albeit a small one. Loading both Oracle and SQL*Plus on one of our 486-66 16Mb machines yields 0 bytes of physical RAM free. This means that front end tools such as VB will be forced to run largely from Virtual memory and hence the slow performance you reported. Loading Oracle without SQLPlus yields about 900K of RAM free on our machine - a bit of an improvement but not much. I hope to get a chance to load PO7 on a larger box (Pentium 90 with 256Mb RAM) this week to try to determine just how much RAM PO7 will grab given an essentially unlimited supply.

I would suggest that 32 Mb RAM is a more reasonable figure for doing serious work with PO7. You note that the Watcom engine is smaller and faster (on a 16 Mb machine). This may be true but comparing Watcom to Oracle 7 is like comparing a Cessna to a Hercules transport plane. What is amazing to me is that Oracle has managed to get an engine as sophisticated as Oracle 7 to work in such an impoverished environment in the first place. Windows 3.1 is not exactly my idea of a robust operating system!