wcs) (11/08/89)
I'm trying to figure out how fast a machine I need for several applications. Most of the DBMS vendors quote their speed as N transactions/second, where transaction is usually Debit/Credit hacked to make their system look good but not be quite comparable to some other DBMS vendor :-). Typical numbers seem to be around 5-10 TPS for small machines and 100-200 for maximum-sized multiprocessors like Pyramid and Sequent. I'm trying to understand what a "transaction" is for this purpose - I assume 2-phase commit with a few records updated from a several tables in a large DBMS? How much data is in a typical benchmark query? What if I want to simply add N records to a table, presumably updating subtotals - I assume this is much cheaper than doing N separate transactions? For most of my applications, however, the major workload isn't transactions, but just queries into a database that doesn't change very fast, such as lookups to an index. How fast are those? I'd expect to be able to do lots more than 10 Queries/Second on a 386-box, assuming some well-structured query. Thanks; Bill -- # Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 4M312 Holmdel NJ 201-949-0705 api.att.com!wcs # .... rainbow's end down that highway ....