Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jato!herron.uucp!jbrown
From: jbrown@herron.uucp (Jordan Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Oracle for PC/Quicksilver
Message-ID: <262@herron.uucp>
Date: 14 Feb 90 19:02:12 GMT
References: <2521@bilpin.UUCP>
Reply-To: jbrown@jato.jpl.nasa.gov
Lines: 26

In article <2521@bilpin.UUCP>, nick@bilpin.UUCP (Nick Price) writes:
> We dont do much with PC's and are strongly unix based so I would much rather
> he chose ORACLE. It would seem that ORACLE's new products Quicksilver and
> DBxl (the Dbase 111+ compiler and interpreter) may be the way to go. So
> my question; Does anyone have any direct experience of these products ?

Well, one rumor I heard (from somebody who heard it from one of the
top people in WordTech (the people who wrote dBXL and Quicksilver))
that the Oracle version was 12,000 times slower than the version using
dBASE databases.  (Yes, that's 1.2e+4.)  Don't know for what operations;
this was about a year ago, and other similar disclaimers.  However, given
the sources I suspect there's at least a nugget of truth.

Historically, for operations where query optimization doesn't help,
the "high end" databases (Oracle et al) are substantially slower than
the "low end" databases (dBASE, FoxBase, etc.).  Just check out any
big comparison of database systems.  Typically they lump the "high end"
ones together and the "low end" ones together, with the timing tests on
different pages, but if you look at both pages...  I seem to remember
some test (think it was creating an index on a 100K record table) where
things in the dBASE market were coming in around 30 minutes and the
"high end" DBMSes were coming in at several hours.  One I believe the
magazine gave up on after a day or so, and it was only half done.
-- 
Jordan Brown
jbrown@jato.jpl.nasa.gov