Re: Sybase 11 TPCC on DEC (your comments please)

The Right Reverend Colin James III wrote:
>
 

| gtravis_at_richmond.infi.net (Glenn Travis) posted with deletions:
| Sybase Leapfrogs Competition; Achieves 'Best On Platform' With SQL Server11
| Source: PR Newswire
|
| EMERYVILLE, Calif., Dec. 22 /PRNewswire/ via NewsPage -- Sybase, Inc.
| (Nasdaq: SYBS), The Enterprise Client/Server Company(TM), today announced
| that Sybase(R) SQL Server(TM) 11 achieved the industry's best TPC-C
| benchmark results ever recorded on the 300 megahertz Digital AlphaServer
| 8400. The Sybase/Digital benchmark achieved 11,014 transactions per minute
| (tpmC) at a price/performance of $222 per tpmC with Sybase SQL Server 11 --
| 17 percent faster and 32 percent less expensive than Oracle's best
| performance result utilizing the same Digital Alpha chip.
 

> The result seems specious as the TPC-C benchmark is not described.
> By contrast, my "primitive" load tests on hardly an optimized object
> database in compiled BASIC, not in the target development language of
> Eiffel, produced this result on the following test on a 586-133, 32
> MB, on one IDE hard disk, no buffer, no cache (hardly a $40,000 +
> Alpha box).
> One transaction consists of 9-reads from 3-memory-tables, 4-reads from
> 4-disk-tables, and 10-writes to 6-disk-tables: 3,360 tpm (I don't
> know what "tpmC" is).
> If a 300 MHz Alpha is linearly equivalent to a 133 MHz Pentium (which
> it may not be), then 300/133 or about 2.25 * 3360 tpm = 7580 tpm which
> is about 45% less than the Sybase mark. (It should be an order of
> magnitude less (10-times less or 1000% less), because my test is in a
> high-order language BASIC, not an intermediate-order language C.)
> The Sybase results do not impress this writer.
 ...
> Correction: I did not bother to read far enough into the puff-piece
> press release to see that the DEC 8400 is not a mere $40K box. It has
> 10-processors and 6GB of RAM, which means the DEC probably jammed the
> entire datbase into memory, ie, no physical disk I/O.
> By contrast, my linear extrapolation of 7580 tpm should be scaled up
> by 10 to 75,800 tpm which would be about 7-times _faster_, at least,
> than Sybase.

The Right Reverend Colin James III,

I think your local Sybase representative should be able to send you the complete testing specifications for your personal review. Then you will be able to see what kind of SW and HW that were included in the setup, and you will also realize the size of the test tables and the huge amounts of data being processed.

In the meantime, the URL http://www.sgi.com/Technology/tpc.html would give you the information you need to comprehend the TPC-C definition and the testing results achieved in the latest Sybase/DEC TPC-C benchmark

The DEC 8400 10 procs/6GB setup is, though utterly enhanced, state-of-the-art for several OLTP/DW combination sites we are currently putting to work in Europe and Asia (Road Tolling central Systems).

;-))

<!-- Jo Arne Lervik -->

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