Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!johan From: johan@cwi.nl (Johan Wolleswinkel) Newsgroups: comp.databases Subject: Re: Ingres docopy Message-ID: <458@turing.cwi.nl> Date: 14 Oct 88 23:23:23 GMT References: <412@rhesus.primate.wisc.edu> Reply-To: johan@turing.UUCP (Johan Wolleswinkel) Organization: CWI, Amsterdam Lines: 67 In article <412@rhesus.primate.wisc.edu> bin@rhesus.primate.wisc.edu (Brain in Neutral) writes: >Why is RTI Ingres docopy such an abysmal loser in version 5 as >compared to version 3? I thought perhaps it was just slow writing >to files if the format list was given, but it's not much better >doing a bulk copy. Is there something I can tweak to speed it up? > >Paul DuBois >dubois@primate.wisc.edu rhesus!dubois >bin@primate.wisc.edu rhesus!bin We, at the CWI, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, got the same feeling when we upgraded from V3 to V5, in february 1987, running on a Dec VAX-750 under Unix BSD 4.3. To quantify this feeling I did some experiments copying some medium-sized table in one of our databases. The table contained 6515 rows of c1,i4,i4,i1,i2,i4,text(255), the mean actual width of the last column was 26; every column was copied with format "c0@", the last column with c0nl, and in a second part of the experiment the c0 was replaced by text(0), which resulted in filesizes of resp. 2.0 MB and 275 kB. We showed the (horrible) results to RTI and they supplied us with another version of the `docopy'- binary, which couldn't be used because of some internal error. The slow-down was caused by extended checking (the only example supplied was checking by row available disk-space to write that single row). It turned out, that the V3- binary could be used within an otherwise V5- system, which we did, until we got another release (V5.0.4, prepared for Mt Xinu 4.3, may 1988). Unfortunately there were some problems using this version under BSD 4.3, so we only used it for development tests. Last week we got a BSD 4.3 version of release V5.0.4; the results for the copy- experiment were rather pleasing: Summary: Version size cpu-time docopy c0 text(0) binary backend docopy backend docopy 5.0/01 (vax.u42/02) + docopy(V3) 8 192 57 102 88 14 5.0/01 (vax.u42/02) 23 552 59 8140 - 5.0/01' 10 240 * * 5.0/04 (vax.u43/01)MtX 50 176 56 11 85 2 5.0/04 (vax.u43/02)BSD 32 768 58 11 93 2 Conclusion: Get a new release from your RTI- office; in the meantime use the `docopy'- binary from V3. Remarks: 1. `docopy' is not only used by Quel or SQL for a `copy' stmt, but also by other products for copying tables to files e.g. by `abf'. 2. I would be interested in sharing other experiences with the Ingres- products. 3. The figures specified for the backends may vary by more than 10 percent, depending upon the load of the system. -- Johan -- Johan Wolleswinkel CWI, Postbus 4079, 1009 AB Amsterdam, Kruislaan 413, The Netherlands Phone: +31 20 5924050 Telex: 12571 (mactr nl) UUCP: johan@cwi.nl or ...{seismo,philabs,decvax}!mcvax!johan