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From: onder@ISI.EDU (Bruce Onder)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: The Rushmore Technology from FoxPro
Message-ID: <18164@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 5 Jun 91 17:51:32 GMT
References: <1991Jun1.165211.27480@ugle.unit.no>
Sender: news@isi.edu
Organization: USC-ISI
Lines: 69
In-reply-to: oysteing@idt.unit.no's message of 1 Jun 91 16:52:11 GMT

In article <1991Jun1.165211.27480@ugle.unit.no> oysteing@idt.unit.no (Oystein Groevlen) writes:

>A few months ago I got a demonstration of the 'revolutionary',
>according to an ad from FoxPro, Rushmore Technology. I am interesting
>in hearing some comments from people that have had some experience
>with it.
>
>From what I could see, the query performance was much better than what
>I have experienced with ORACLE/INGRES, but we only got an limited
>demonstration.

I attended a demo of FoxPro 2.0.  TRushmore was very fast, but we
weren't comparing it to other things.  From personal experience, I
know it's faster than FoxPro 1.02, R:Base, and dBase x.0.

>My impression was that the technology is based on some technique where
>indexes occupy much less space than usual. Thus, it is possible to
>index all fields of a table and keep all indexes in memory. This way
>queries can be processed with a minimum of disk access. Is this your
>impression, too?

Yes.

>I seem to remember reading on this group that FoxPro needs a lot of
>memory. What happens if all indexes does not fit into memory? Is there
>a significant decrease in performance?

Dunno.

>The table used for the demonstration consisted of only character
>fields. Does an index of an integer field take much more space than an
>index of a character filed? As you probably know, you can usually
>compress text much more than numbers (Huffman code, Tries etc.)

You are right, although the difference is not very noticeable on a
human-user level.

>We only got a demonstration of selection from one table. How is the
>performance on joins?

Dunno.

>Do you think the Rushmore Technology is really revolutionary?

I can't tell you, because I don't know what they're doing,
specifically.  I was impressed with the speed, though.

>As memory gets cheaper, it will maybe be possible to store large
>amounts of data in memory for faster query processing. This will
>significantly increase the query performance. Do you think this will
>cause great changes in the DBMS-market?

Sure!  There will be less and less performance hit on larger and
larger files.

>Thanks for any response. Please post to the net. If you prefer email I
>will summarize to the net.

Okay.  Sorry I can't tell you more, besides:  Impressed, and liking
it.

Bruce


--
Bruce W. Onder		onder@isi.edu
	       (He's not your everyday-type prankster!)
		    I'm Ice-T:  Original Gangster
		      (O.G.:  Original Gangster)