Re: Database performance and size

markp10013_at_aol.com (MarkP10013) wrote:

>I was wondering if someone could shed some light on this debate;
>Some people I've talked with think that the performance of a database will
>be
>affected as the number of rows in the tables grow. Others say that
>performance
>won't be affected at all no matter how large the database gets. Which
>opinion is true? I know this sounds trivial, but it's seem to be one of
>those questions that tests theory and real world experiences.
 

> regards,
 

> Mark

If you are always using indexes, performance should be consistent regardless to the number of rows. If you need to do full table scans, performance is determined by how fast you can read all of the required blocks into memory, so the larger the object, the more blocks, the longer to read them. If you throw a lot of disk bandwidth at a database, you can get reasonable performance, given the work you are doing. I've personally set up systems that do full table scans of 8 gig (50 million rows) in about 3 minutes. In this case the hardware was set up to read about 45 meg per second sustained. Of course if you throw a lot of memory at the problem, you can get even better performance! Received on Sun Dec 24 1995 - 00:00:00 CET