Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!dgis!jkrueger
From: jkrueger@dgis.daitc.mil (Jonathan Krueger)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Extended RDB vs OODB
Keywords: OODB C++ RDBMS
Message-ID: <28@dgis.daitc.mil>
Date: 16 Aug 89 00:02:35 GMT
References: <3560052@wdl1.UUCP> <411@odi.ODI.COM> <458@cimshop.UUCP> <2177@cadillac.CAD.MCC.COM> <20@dgis.daitc.mil> <2230@cadillac.CAD.MCC.COM> <3367@rtech.rtech.com>
Organization: DTIC Special Projects Office (DTIC-SPO), Alexandria VA
Lines: 39

dennism@menace.rtech.COM (Dennis Moore, INGRES/teamwork) writes:

>...the SAME server can serve literally hundreds of users...
>Therefore, I have no issue with the claim that a single user system is
>better off with a highly tuned, memory hogging, specialized access
>method, than an RDBMS.

We run the latest release of INGRES that RTI sells for Berkeley UNIX on
Pyramid, VAX, and Gould.  None of them supports servers yet.  Our
INGRES applications use about a megabyte of physical memory per
additional active concurrent user on Pyramid.

We regard this performance as adequate.  We bought our system to serve
users, not ration resources.  It would be nice to serve more users with
the same resources, as we anticipate when we receive INGRES 6.0.  But
our users would not be served at all without the development tools that
RTI has been providing since INGRES 3.0.

Therefore I'd like to divide the question: efficient implementation of
a data model versus inherently bad performance of some models for some
operations.  Recent traffic has confused the two issues without
addressing either.  It tells us very little that a current DBMS
performs poorly.  References to applications without specifying their
operations or describing their design tell us nothing.

For instance, Bruce alludes to operations like "netlist a circuit" and
"package the electronics".  It would be wonderful indeed to understand
the electronics that underlies all the computing we do, but I'll settle
for characterizing some operations that engineers need.  Can you
specify these operations in some terms we can understand?  Or simpler
ones?  How might one implement them with a relational data model?  Are
there data models that can be shown inherently better for some of these
operations?

-- Jon
-- 
Jonathan Krueger    jkrueger@dgis.daitc.mil   uunet!dgis!jkrueger
Isn't it interesting that the first thing you do with your advanced powerful
color bitmapped windowing workstation on a network is emulate an ASR33?