Re: Informix limitations, should we be using Oracle?

"Simon M." <freetheshrimps_at_yahoo.com.au> wrote in message news:f650c990.0210161752.14d52568_at_posting.google.com...
> Well, what can I say??? Didn't mean to start WWIII guys! First of,
> thanks to Daniel for posting the only useful response. To the others,
> I can assure you that I don't work for Oracle or any marketing company
> or whatever. I've picked up a large DW project that has been mangled
> in the past and I'm trying to find out some of the root causes. Of
> course I'm going to IBM as well to get their feedback but as I've had
> some good help from this group before, I thought that maybe someone
> would have some relevant experience or could help to set me and the
> team here straight.
>
> We've tried to get some experienced resource in to help us out but out
> here in Australia there are no appropriate skills. None. We've tried.
> It's a last gasp for us... I'd love to get the thing working as it's
> intended but at most we've been able to read the manual, make
> observations on performance and draw our own conclusions - which from
> the feedback, seem to be fundamentally wrong. No-one has pointed out
> why, but not to worry, we'll keep trying.
>

I'd be more than happy to come to Australia to help you with XPS. Sorry if I thought your original post was a bit too much like a couple I've seen in the past, from people that shouldn't be around sharp objects or computers. Talk to your pre-sales people they can help you more than anyone. The only problem with this is that the business model they use works only for pre-sales, after a sale they want you to talk to tech support. So you might have to do some extra effort to get the answers from the vendors--at least from Informix.

Since your XPS isn't clusterd, you're still living with the limitations of the box. You could set up virtual co-servers on one box, but again you're stuck with the total one-box-resource problem, everything still has to work with the single point of hardware even if you used virtual coservers. I know of one firm here in the US that was doing a combination, they had 8 co-servers on three HP Superdomes, for a total of 24 virtual co-servers clustered across these 3 behemoths. I thought this was a bit odd, but what the heck it's their money... Anyway, the box still determines the total performance. IBM and others have made XPS faster with hardware that is tailored to clustering, again hardware has a lot to do with making XPS work fast. So don't expect XPS to really do much on one box. A rather large bank here in the US clusetered 100 or more XPS boxes together using EMC disks, etc. The project I was on was for a utility company. We had an Oracle demo by the way in Spain for our project, and it was the demo we needed that helped us pick XPS.

Oracle...Oracle will only cluster to about 4 or 5 servers and it uses a shared disk arrangement so it has a lot of limitations. If you can afford to cluster, go with XPS on several boxes, or maybe even tinker with DB2's clustering, which I hear works with clusters of different types and makes of boxes, and is shared-nothing like XPS. Oracle is shared disk and a different method of clustering that is not exactly fast, but it is supposedly reliable. :-) Oracle is still using the older engine repackaged in new marketing, so again ask yourself if you really want that. DB2 is supposed to have some pretty nice features for clustering on the cheap so at least check it out.

Personally, if you can't afford more boxes it doesn't really matter about which DB you use, but I'd search for anything non-Oracle first, and pick Oracle last simply from the cost standpoint. The labor will be the cheapest you can get that from India. ;-)

My .02 USD.

Tim

PS I am far from being an XPS master, I was just lucky enough to have Informix's Advanced Technology Group people standing over my shoulder on more than one occasion showing me the way. Glory days.....

> Oh, completely agree about the 'why are you running XPS on one node?'
> comments. That is what we inherited and we don't understand either...
> if someone could give me the $$$ then I'd go out and buy more servers
> etc. but that ain't going to happen in a hurry.
>
> Our feeling at the moment is that we need a db for which there are DBA
> skills available on the open market in our country. At the moment, we
> can't see what's going on in XPS and we can't see that changing...
>
> Sorry to waste anyone's time and feel free to ignore the thread!
>
> Cheers,
> Simon.
>
> (Oh, and yes, of course it is a star schema...)
Received on Thu Oct 17 2002 - 13:36:41 CEST