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From: chesky@leland.Stanford.EDU (Snehylata Gupta)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: INGRES (was: Re: Oracle/Ingres Comparison Request)
Summary: INGRES problems, ORACLE, INFORMIX
Message-ID: <1991Mar14.182225.12723@leland.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 14 Mar 91 18:22:25 GMT
References: <1698@formtek.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: AIR, Stanford University
Lines: 80

In article <1698@formtek.UUCP> rak@formtek (Rich Koch) writes:
>
>	We are looking for a database product that can allow us to
>build user-friendly interfaces with the product's forms package on
>VAX workstations running VMS, Sun SPARC workstations running UNIX 
>(Sun OS), and IBM RS6000 workstations running AIX.  Performance and

>	From what I saw today on the net, I have been led to believe
>that INGRES's stability on the DEC RISC ULTRIX is questionable and
>Oracle is less than prompt with its upgrades.  I need more info.
>
>			Rich Koch

INGRES haas stability problems even on the VMS platform. We have had
a lot of problems with INGRES version 6 (6.2, 6.3) running on VMS
version 5.x (5.1, 5.2, 5.3). I still prefer INGRES to ORACLE but it
seems sometimes that INGRES was designed by a bunch of graduate
students who did not really have much idea of a user environment. For
example one consistent problem that we have had with INGRES is the
handling of a bad database access typically :

	select *
	from x, y
	where x.a != y.b

The INGRES developers probably assumed that such queries would not be
submitted. However in a real life environment most programmers have
never been exposed to the power (:-( ) of SQL. It is not easy for a 
PL1/COBOL/FORTRAN programmer to grasp the intricacies involved, so this
happens much more often than one would assume. When tables x and y are
large (50K or 100K or more) it can get very bad. I know I have been
there (many many times).

When you look at the engine you will see that this query is just hogging
all the resourcess and not allocating any resources to other users.

When you have 100+ users on the system and a developer launched such a
query. You will start getting phone calls within 15-30 min. When you go
and yell at the developer. Lets say he kills the job. So you expect that
that would solve all your problems. But wait your problems have just
begun. Because now INGRES has begun to cleanup after itself. So you sit
there and watch (I have watched for upto 5-6 hours while this
continues.) That is not all of it. Let us say that the concerned
database resides on a certain disk which is also shared by some other
application. All of a sudden this disk is now full and users are getting
no response and 0 disk space available problem. Why? because INGRES
needs the disk space for the temporary tables and since it is smart (?)
once that disk is full it will just go over to the next disk.

By this time your boss is standing over your shoulder as is the system
manager and you are telling them that you have been trying to kill all
the processes but they are not going away. So you have to shut INGRES
down completely. Some databases (at least) will be corrupted. There have
been cases when we had to reboot the machine (VAX 8800 - VMS) but noone
could prove that it was INGRES's fault.

The time out feature in VMS has problems in recognizing INGRES activity.

However :
-------

All the above problems have only when INGRES is misused. INGRES does not
seem to give much problems if you know what you are doing.

Maybe I have been overly harsh in my criticism of INGRES's problems but
as a total system I prefer it to ORACLE and INFORMIX. I am using ORACLE
currently and it is a more robust system than INGRES in the way it handles
bad programmers but ORACLE version 6 is not as powerful as INGRES.

If I had to choose between the 2 I would pick INGRES. But I would (sigh)
still reserve the right to complain.

Most of the discussion in here has focussed on INGRES and ORACLE. I have
used INFORMIX a little bit. I was surprised at it's user friendliness
speed and the power of it's 4GL. However I have not had enough
experrience to make a detailed comment on it.


/*Sanjay */
chesky@leland.stanford.edu