🚀 go-pugleaf

Excerpts from netnews.comp.sys.next.software: 29-Oct-92 Re:  Sybase 5.0?
by andrew@cubetech.com 
> Porting to NetWare also makes much more technical sense.  Sybase
> properly written for NetWare will just blow the doors off a NeXT based
> version and cheaper hardware to boot.  Probably fare well against a
> low end SS-10 if not being faster too.

Hmm.  Let me throw in some background for my comments.  I worked over
the summer with a company that produced software running off of
SQL-based Relational Database Servers.  They used Oracle & SQLbase, to
be specific.  They had a Compaq SystemPro '386 (33MHz, I think) & 16 MB
of RAM, with a RAID drive array.  (They had much faster machines around,
'486-33's & 50's; but these couldn't use the RAID, so they continued to
use the Compaq as the database server.)  They got in a SPARCstation IPX
to compare performance.

Novell Netware versions were the fastest over either MS-DOS or OS/2
based versions of the RDS.  The IPX (with 16MB of RAM) was around 30% to
50% faster than the SystemPro, meaning that a '486-based SystemPro would
beat the IPX.  A 32MB SPARC-2 was gotten, and it was substantially
faster than the IPX, and would compete head-to-head with a fast '486.  A
SS-10 would blow away any '486 machine currently on the market for doing
heavy calculations.  A Turbo NeXT machine should fall into the
performance range between the IPX and the SS-2.

Note that the Netware-based systems do have very good transient
response; ie. a simple query that can be answered by pages of the
database currently in memory was dealt with very quickly.  This seems to
be related to the low overhead in network transmission for NetWare
compared to the much higher overhead involved on a unix machine.

But note that a '486 Compaq SystemPro is *not* cheap; in fact, low end
SS-10's are cheaper.  While there are much cheaper clones available, the
company has extensively tested them in house, and examined customer
installations using cheaper machines for a database server.  They found
out that the cheaper machines took a substantial performance loss,
generally to unacceptable levels.  This was primarily due to poor I/O
throughput, both through the network card, to the hard drive(s), and
even along the backplane of the machine (ie: some only had 16-bit memory
buses).

(PS: they've noted that Compaq has made substantially better machines
for high-performance servers than IBM...)

-Chuck


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