Re: Hardware/OS recommendations for large databases (

Merlin,

On 11/15/05 7:20 AM, "Merlin Moncure" <merlin(dot)moncure(at)rcsonline(dot)com> wrote:
>
> It's hard to say what would be better. My gut says the 5u box would be
> a lot better at handling high cpu/high concurrency problems...like your
> typical business erp backend. This is pure speculation of course...I'll
> defer to the experts here.

With Oracle RAC, which is optimized for OLTP and uses a shared memory
caching model, maybe or maybe not. I¹d put my money on the SMP in that case
as you suggest, but what happens when the OS dies?

For data warehousing, OLAP and decision support applications, RAC and other
shared memory/disk architectures don¹t do you any good and the SMP machine
is better by a bit.

However, if you have an MPP database, where disk and memory are not shared,
then the SMP machine is tens or hundreds of times slower than the cluster of
the same price.

- Luke