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From: pavlov@hscfvax.UUCP (840033@G.Pavlov)
Newsgroups: net.database
Subject: Re: Speed of Un*x DBMS's (Was: speed of ORACLE, etc.)
Message-ID: <208@hscfvax.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 9-Aug-86 03:28:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: hscfvax.208
Posted: Sat Aug  9 03:28:52 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 11-Aug-86 04:01:01 EDT
References: <449@oracle.UUCP> <235@hdsvx1.UUCP> <394@hplabsc.UUCP> <4664@sun.uucp> <502@hplabsc.UUCP>
Organization: Health Sciences Computing Facility, Harvard University
Lines: 24
Summary: obsolete benchmarks

In article <502@hplabsc.UUCP>, kempf@hplabsc.UUCP (Jim Kempf) writes:
> I also disagree that RDBMS systems are evolving so fast that any benchmarks
> will be oboslete in 6 months. The underlying RDBMS technology is now
> fairly mature, ......
> A customer who is interested in buying now doesn't want to be told
> that (s)he should wait six months, and persumably the company is
> also interested in making the sale.

  True, a customer must buy if the application is waiting.  But it is also 
  true that any set of benchmarks more than 3-4 months old are likely to be
  obsolete.  Taking the last 6 months, in fact, Oracle issued one new release,
  and Ingres 2.  Each of these releases increased "overall performance" by 
  25-40% or so (depending on who you are talking to and which core functions
  you're looking at) - and both vendors promise more of the same in the near
  future.
  When looking at performance, one aspect that might be worth investigating
  is how each competing vendor achieves that performance (the "uderlying
  technology").  This may give a clue to what the vendor may be able to
  achieve in the future re further performance enhancements.  While perform-
  ance of some RDBMS's is now decent, some areas still leave much to be desired-
   for instance, obtaining aggregates (especially "a by b") is still quite
  painful, time-wise, in most systems.

    greg pavlov, fstrf, amherst, ny.