[comp.sys.novell] Oracle Server for NetWare taught my alien cat

saddison@ca.excelan.com (Skip Addison) (03/15/91)

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Reply-To: saddison@ca.excelan.com (Skip Addison)
Organization: Novell, Sunnyvale, CA
References: <1991Mar13.042255.467@ice9.uucp>
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Date: Thu, 14 Mar 1991 17:08:05 GMT

In article <1991Mar13.042255.467@ice9.uucp> bgh@ice9.uucp (barry hannigan) writes:
>just got back from our local oracle users group meeting and the tech performing
>made a statement of how the oracle server for netware was a NLM, and also an
>integral component in the regression tests used by novell to certify other 
>NLMs.

I don't know if this is true or not.  Might be, though we usually use our own
products in-house (eg. NetWare SQL).
>
>is this an example of marketting exuberance? if so, why would novell do 
>something like this? without an exception i can think of, databases are toxic 
>to operating systems, with the impact on netware conceivably larger due to its
>single nature. 

I'm not sure what you mean by this statement.  Databases are being
increasingly being used by the different services Novell offers (file, comm,
etc).  Perhaps you mean from a performance standpoint when doing large scale
reports, etc?  I don't think that a database being used to log test
data is likely to overload NetWare or any other OS.  Also (warning, NetWare
plug follows) NetWare uses much less of the CPU than other OS's to provide
file service, so there's plenty of CPU bandwidth left over for NLMs.  I/O
bandwidth can be a limiting factor, of course.

>the other point he made was that the novell OS is non-preemptive. i have no 
>knowledge of this fact or otherwise, but if so, would a wildly large sql 
>statement parse not hiccup the whole system.

See statement above regarding CPU usage.  Certainly parsing the statement 
won't make a dent in a 386-33 (for example).  Sorting a 300MB database might
impact disk channel I/O, but not any worse than it would on any OS,
pre-emptive or not.

-- Skip
   saddison@novell.com