lindsay@dscatl.UUCP (Lindsay Cleveland) (01/02/90)
I have a client who is seriously thinking about buying SYBASE to
run on a network of Sun's with the database files spread across
different nodes on the network. These files will be in the gigabyte
range.
Would some of you database users please comment on your experiences:
- Would you use SYBASE or would you go with another DBM?
- Does it live up to the literature or is it partly vaporware?
- Is it "solid" or still a bit "buggy"?
- What sort of response do you get from the vendor?
- General feeling about the product?
I note that site 'sybase' is on the net. Perhaps someone there
would also care to comment.
My thanks to all who take the time to respond.
Cheers,
Lindsay
Lindsay Cleveland Digital Systems Co. Atlanta, Ga
gatech!dscatl!lindsay (404) 497-1902
(U.S. Mail: PO Box 1149, Duluth, GA 30136)ben@hobbes.sybase.com (ben "moses" ullrich) (01/05/90)
sure, we here at sybase would love to comment, but i don't think our comments
would be viewed as truly objective, since we are talking about our own company
here. even if i had experience with other dbms's (it should be no surprise that
i'm not allowed to use anything but SYBASE here in sybase mis..!), i couldn't
appear to be totally objective in discussing pros and cons of each, especially
given that i'm using sybase systems to give this information. can you say,
``conflict of interest?'' i knew you could.
perhaps if you have technical questions on features or operational aspects of
sybase that you think are key to your use of it, we at sybase could comment
on those, and others could comment on how their dbms implements these modules.
for instance, i can possibly infer from your atricle that you wish to
distribute the database files all over your network. if this means having the
(typical) one sybase sql server running on one host with all its database files
mounted on this host system via nfs, you should realize that this scenario is
not very optimal from a performance and network efficiency standpoint. sybase
is designed to use raw disk partitions (ideally using asynchronous i/o) that
are physically attached to the machine running the sql server. using nfs-ed
database files requires that every read or write from a database device
result in one to many reads over the network from the sql server
machine to the host that has the real disk attached to it. if a query
is made from a client process on one of these disk servers to the sql
server machine, it is conceivable that the sql server would have to read
database pages off the disk on the disk server, over nfs to the sql
server, which would end up sending the results once more back to the
querying client process on the disk server. that equals twice as much
network overhead as is necessary. i would recommend keeping all the
disk in one place, on disk drives attached to the machine that runs the
sql server. all the other hosts in the network may query the sql
server, which incurs 0 network overhead to read database files because
they are on local disk. this is the basic recommended sun installation.
there are other ways to accomplish something similar, using several sql servers
involved in 2-phase commit or remote procedure calls to share data.
i hope this helps. please post more questions of you have specific technical
questions about how features work, what makes sense in a configuration, etc.
those are at least my favorites..!
..ben
----
ben ullrich only i do the talking here -- not my employer.
sybase, inc., emeryville, ca
ben@sybase.com {pyramid,pacbell,sun,lll-tis}!sybase!ben