Powerhouse & database choices.

[Erne Kevin (Softlab)]

I have used both RdB V6 and Oracle V7.3 on VMS.
>From a DBA's point of view RdB is by far the best choice.

*	Better backup mechanism        : a couple of lines vs 100 line
script (maybe this has changed with Oracle 8 RMAN ??)
*	Better recovery mechanism      : again a few lines versus the
tortuous mindgames involved with Oracle 
*	Easier performance monitoring  : RMU vs big clunky scripts 
*	Easier maintenance 	    : you could not rename a column in
Oracle until  8i

Also as has  been said PowerHouse has a special data access interface to
RDB. 
It seems to generate BLR instead of SQL which I assume is much quicker.
With Oracle , I  think an OCI has to be used  which must involve  some sort
of overhead.

A lot of the performance problems I have encountered with RdB stem from
locking on 
badly designed indexes i.e.low cardinality,incorrect fill factor. 
If this is sorted out the problem usually goes away.

Having said that Rdb did seem to lock a bit more than Oracle. 

Oracle 8i  does offer lots of fancy new features such as OO typing ,Java
Store procedures ..
Only useful if your business actually needs it though.

Moving a database to Unix should always offer a performance improvement 
since Unix disk IO is inherenty faster than VMS  
  

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Chris Sharman [SMTP:Chris.Sharman@ccagroup.co.uk]
> Sent:	20 June 2001 15:48
> To:	margaret.kramarz@mfi.co.uk
> Cc:	Chris.Sharman@ccagroup.co.uk; powerh-l@lists.swau.edu
> Subject:	RE: Powerhouse & database choices.
> 
> 
> >I just wanted to comment on the Alpha/VMS - Oracle Rdb configuration.
> >I believe that indeed the performance would be OK for the 4GB database.
> >
> >However this configuration did not work for us.
> >We were running 300Gb Oracle Rdb on Alpha/VMS in cluster environment of 4
> >apx4100 machines
> >@600Mhz and 8Mb memory against Powerhouse 710g1. We had over 300 users. 
> 
> You surely don't mean 8Mb memory ? That's barely enough to boot !
> 
> >The performance was very poor with lots of bottlenecks in the area of
> >OpenVMS Lock Manager, 
> >even though we employed solid state disk and memory channel.
> 
> This area's been discussed at length in comp.os.vms & elsewhere: there are
> (as I've mentioned recently) extensive performance enhancements in this
> area
> in VMS 7.3 (shipping). VMS has traditionally been written for safety
> rather
> than speed: try unplugging either system (Rdb+VMS or Oracle+Unix) on a
> busy
> afternoon, and seeing which is back up fastest with least loss !
> That said, a well tuned Rdb database is reputedly pretty fast, too.
> 
> Chris
> _______________________________________________________________________
> Chris.Sharman@CCAgroup.co.uk		http://www.ccagroup.co.uk/
> CCA Stationery Ltd, Eastway, Fulwood, Preston, Lancashire, PR2 9WS.
> 
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