Powerhouse & database choices.
Edis, Bob
bob.edis@fleetpride.com
Wed, 20 Jun 2001 14:17:58 -0500
A few words from the Oracle web site on Rdb (www.oracle.com/rdb).
"Oracle Rdb, as an important member of the Oracle Corporation family of
products, is continually developing exciting new features to meet customers'
expanding needs."
>From the 'Statement of Direction' page:
"Oracle Rdb enjoys phenomenal success in environments requiring the utmost
in performance, reliability, availability and maintainability. Since Rdb
became part of Oracle Corporation in late 1994, customers have enjoyed a
significant enhancement in its capabilities and unparalleled support for
their most mission critical systems."
note: NOT 1996.
"Rdb is one of the software industry's most successful acquisition stories."
"Oracle Corporation has added nearly 50% new code during the last 5 years.
This significant enhancement has enabled product successes which make Rdb a
database of choice for high-throughput, critical database applications on
OpenVMS systems. Oracle Rdb products today host a very significant portion
of the world's:
Cellular telephone customer service and billing systems,
Lotteries,
Financial exchanges,
Satellite Direct Broadcast Television systems,
Integrated circuit manufacturing,
And many other extremely high volume systems which absolutely cannot
tolerate failure."
"Oracle is quite proud of the contribution it has made to Rdb and the level
of service that is available to Rdb customers. Not only is Rdb enhanced by
the development investment Oracle has made, but it also benefits from being
part of the Oracle family of products." "Rdb is a successful business for
Oracle Corporation."
"Oracle Corporation's commitment to Rdb and to Rdb customers is ongoing and
open-ended."
This doesn't sound to me like a "declining core product". What is Cognos'
take on the issue?
Regards,
Blue
-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Hawks [mailto:hawksj@yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 1:59 PM
To: Edis, Bob; 'powerh-l@list.swau.edu'
Subject: RE: Powerhouse & database choices.
All,
Just some background for your reading pleasure. Oracle
purchased Rdb from DEC in 1996 to expand the
capabilities of O7x, which needed Rdb's VLDB
technology. Rdb at that time was far superior in
handling update volumes, queries and large data
storage. The basic underlying indexing schemes and
table space organization were superior to Oracle's
technology. Within a year Oracle announced Oracle 8.x
which contained the ability to take a single table and
create it across multiple, independent table spaces
and arrange the data into these partitions. Now,
Oracle could provide users the ability to perform
parallel loading into separate partitions. They could
be placed offline independent of other partitions for
backup and maintenance. Some of this motivation
addressed their competitors technologies that were
surpassing O7x through advances due to data
warehousing and the need to 24x7 operations. As good
as Rdb is I believe it is a declining core product.
--- "Edis, Bob" <bob.edis@fleetpride.com> wrote:
> Another plus for Oracle Rdb - multiple BLOBs per
> row, Oracle 7 and 8 can
> have only one BLOB per row.
> Another plus for Oracle 7 and 8 - single transaction
> for update and read. I
> think this is where the lower locking comes from as
> Oracle Rdb uses two
> default transactions, one for read and another for
> update.
>
> Blue
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Erne Kevin (Softlab)
> [mailto:Kevin.Erne@Softlab.co.uk]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 10:27 AM
> To: 'Chris Sharman'; margaret.kramarz@mfi.co.uk
> Cc: powerh-l@lists.swau.edu
> Subject: RE: Powerhouse & database choices.
>
>
> 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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Jon Jared Hawks
Partnership is a privilege. Don't abuse it.
Business Intelligence Applications
Anything you read from Jon (Jared) Hawks is his own
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