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Linux Grabs World Record For TPC-H Benchmark
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Linux 2.4.3 now holds the world record by performance with IBM's DB2 in TPC-H. TPC-H is a decision support benchmark consisting of a suite of business oriented and ad-hoc queries and concurrent data modifications. This is way cool as the world record was held by SQL Server 2000 on Windows 2000 before." Caveats: this is only in the 100GB (smallest) category, and all but 2 of the other entries are several months old. Even so;)
Um, did you notice that the linux benchmark was $347/QphH while the next one on the list (W2K) is $161/QphH. Which one is more expen$ive?
You may have to shell out thousands for the software (vs free Linux) but the _machine_ dominates by a lot. The Linux configuration was 4x the cost of the Windows configuration ($1M vs $250K).
There's really three different markets, with Linux winning two and Windows winning one.
Under 1 GB is dominated by Linux. It's cheap, it's fast. Hard to sell software to this market because the total budget is usually in the low thousands at most.
1 GB-100 GB is decent with Windows. Much more bang for the buck then the Linux solution. At the top end, Windows just can't handle the load and buckles. At the bottom end, it starts becoming unrealistic to really spend a lot of money on your database.
Over 100 GB is dominated by the hard-core *nices. Linux can probably be used seriously now although a lot of companies would rather go with the proven solution and pay. When $10k software is under 1% of your total purchase price, free OS vs paid OS isn't much of an issue.
Although it seems very logically that a 4 machine cluster is faster than it's single machine counterpart, it's not that simple an equation.
Not every database or operating system can scale that well. Lets take a look at each individual machine of the cluster. They are SGI 1450s with 4-way Xeon 700Mhz. The nearest competitor on the performance chart is the NEC 4-way machine, which is at 800. Assuming each individual machine of this cluster is also at about 800 tpm, then the cluster scaled at 85%. Not too shabby. Can you do the same type of scaling with Oracle? Not likely(look at any of the Oracle benchmarks, the biggest cluster they got have two machines).
Also, if you have recently read what the Oracle guys have been asking the kernel developers, you would know that there are a lot of features that the Linux kernel is missing right now causing it to not perform optimally as a DB server. The SGI and IBM guys have worked hard to get around every one of these barriers in order to get these results. This really shows that both these companies are very dedicated to make Linux be the top choice as DB servers in the future.
I don't want to burst anyone's bubble, but Linux off the shelve at the moment is still a very immature operating system for a DB server. However, with the work of companies like SGI and IBM, Linux now has a top result on a industry recognized benchmark.I wouldn't be surprise if there are more results coming in the near future.
Congrats to both companies for this great result!
PS/SQL Powerful? Try JAVA... or even better, on postgres you have C.
:)
... we have a policy of no Windows NT/2k machines in our datacenter so no SQL Server. Give PG a shot, you would be surprised.
My DB life started as a MS SQL DBA and I must admit that SQL 7 was a pretty nice product. For a workgroup DB server it can't be beat, though I do agree it requires way to much babysitting to sit in a datacenter.
MySQL is a joke (IMHO) for any serous database work We have a large ASP that is running completely on ASP. (We power image sharing websites).. we are getting 1-2 million hits a day from the various customers websites which we power. Also the nature of the website puts the database into a position of doing various inserts/updates/deletes/selects on VERY large tables.
After testing our application with both Oracle/Sybase (11.9)/DB2/Informix and lastly Postgres... the database that satisfied our needs of a VERY high transaction database stable and scalable was Postgresql. Version 7.1 finaly was able to impliment some of the last needed features and writing our stored procedures in C is no problem for us.
Also, the architecture of our database allows us to easily cluster our databse contents across multiple servers and PGSQL cost structure fits our needs there to keep our performance top notch.
I found DB2 to be just to damn touchy. Oracle was too damn expensive and
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Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?
... since when did doubling the amount of performance only cost twice as much money?
Never? Have you ever seen anything like it? Even something as simple as getting double clock rate from Intel costs about 4 times the amount of money. Is someone somehow not expecting that going from extreme performance, to twice the performance would NOT cost 4 times as much?
1. Doubling the amount of CPUs does not yield double performance, but cost much more than twice the amount. This would happen to the Windows 2000 servers as well.
2. Did anyone at least check out what is included in the price? I do not know, but for all I know, the SGI 1450 may be equipped with more levels of redundancy, have more expensive (more stable, not fastedr) hardware.
3. The operating system cost for one of these beasts is miniscule, so I as a Linux-advocate would not even consider arguing for price of the OS for machines like this. (I'd argue performance, stability and tweakability).
What's wrong with you?
Why does it seem that most people spend most of their time hoping for something bad to happen to Microsoft? If there's a security problem with a Microsoft product, it's not a *good* thing, much less is it "too good to be true"! If Linux scores better in a database test, it's a good thing because it means there have been advancements in software. It's not a good thing because Microsoft came 2nd.
The whole culture of hate here on Slashdot (and in the open source community in general) really bothers me.. Why do you have to hate something? Why isn't it enough for you that Linux or your favorite open source project is successful and works great? Why do you have to stomp everything else? No wonder people say "open source, closed minds".
If it was just 13 year olds writing the comments, I'd understand it. But it's the editors of Slashdot too! You guys really should set a better example than that. Even Linus Torvalds said in a recent CNET interview that he doesn't understand why everyone hates Bill Gates so much.
It's much more productive - and much better for the cause (which is to make better software, remember?) - to focus your energy in positive things. Write software, report bugs, test.. Sure, celebrate Linux being first in a database test, but don't celebrate it because it knocked away Windows 2000 & SQL Server 2000 from that spot.
Define yourself by what you are for - not by what you are against.
at least per CPU
the SGI 1450 Server as 16 procs
2733/16 = 170(TCP) per CPU
ProLiant 8000-X700-8P as 8 procs
1699/8 = 212 per CPU
and doesn't the DataCenter(tm) version support like 64 procs?
Anyway, i think it's pretty damm cool linux is on top, it reassures me that TPC.org isn't just one of Microsoft bit-achs.
-Jon
this is my sig.
Okay, so a few months ago, you ran an article: Are TPC Benchmarks A Worthwhile Measure? where this test was derided as being a worthless measurement? It was seen as "not realistic" because nobody needs those kind of servers... At least on Slashdot.
So now that SGI cranks out a server with twice the processors and knocks off a half year old record, it's legitimate because Linux wins?
This is absurd. Either this is a legit benchmark or not, make up your mind. If you justify hype like this, then you are no better than MS's FUD teams.
You can't honestly view benchmarks as: well, when Linux wins they are the holy grail, but when someone else wins, it's rigged.
Alex
This doesn't really suprise me. We've been using db2 in production on Linux at work (www.osogrande.com) for about 2 or 2 1/2 years (since the UDB 5 beta on Linux came out). It is easy to install (aside from some curses incompatibilities on RH7.1, which will get resolved shortly), easy to administer and performs well.
For free databases, I prefer postgres (transactional support, referential integrity, triggers, etc.). For commercial support, I have trouble liking Oracle (terrible query optimization for large queries, no statistics-based optimization like db2, much harder to administer, etc.). DB2 UDB on Linux is a low-cost, high-feature, high-performing dream.
I've used Oracle (on AIX, adminned by pros), SQL Server (adminned by me and MCSEs) and most recently DB2 (on Linux, adminned by me).
I have to say out of all these, SQL Server is easiest to admin, but as a DB needs constant nursing.
DB2 needs a moderate level of nursing. I have found it to be 'moody' - killing a long-running batch job sometimes seems to stop the DB, and it's far too easy to get the database into a 'backup pending' state where everything refuses to run until you execute an off-line backup.
We also have problems where a batch process seems to lock an entire tablespace, blocking other updates. An experienced DB2 DBA told me that standard practice was for each table to have its own tablespace (kinda like MySQL), which seems to me to be a bit of an admin headache when you want to e.g. change settings for a group of tables.
On-line backups seem to back up all transactions since the last off-line backup, so eventually you have to take the DB down and do an off-line backup so you can clear the logs.
Maybe some of the problems I've had with DB2 are answered in the docs. They're comprehensive, but it's next to impossible to find anything. I usually resort to grepping the HTML tree.
Oracle needs the least nursing; I haven't adminned it, but I've worked on sites which have no DBA, where the database has run happily for months. No doubt a pain to set it up properly, but (like Unix) once it's going you can (in theory) forget about it and get on with some work.
As a developer I must say I prefer Oracle to DB2 and SQL Server; Oracle's stored procedure language (PL/SQL) is much more powerful than either DB2 or SQL Server - you can actually do useful things without resorting to C, Java or Visual Basic.
Contrary to what was said above, Oracle has had stats-based query optimization since at least V7; IDK how the query optimization compares with DB2 (although I've managed to write some some slow queries in both languages that benefitted from simple re-arrangement), but one thing I have learned - DB2 makes the query plan when a statement is compiled, and doesn't change it thereafter. Oracle makes the query plan at execution time (and caches it for efficiency) this means that if the nature of your data changes, or you add new indices, you have to re-compile the queries stored in DB2 or it will continue to use inefficient query plans. I consider this extremely stupid.
There was an excellent shareware developer/admin tool for Oracle called TOAD, that did pretty much everything you could want; I'd kill for something similar for DB2.
Oracle's docs are also much more usable, and (most importantly of all) there's a pile of good O'Reilly books covering all aspects of using Oracle.
Yes, but did you also notice that SGI supplied 44x the ammount of storage that was required, Compaq only supplied 13x. I.e to put then level you could decrease the SGI cost from 300k to 100k. They also supplied a 30K UPS, which Compaq didn't bother to include. The whole system was overspec'ed, and not in directions that actually aid the performance.
(you don't need 4 monitors to run a DB server, for example...)
FP.
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Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
There are a lot of problems with coming out and saying that Linux is the hands-down winner of this benchmark. The first problem is that the Linux system has twice as many processors as the next system down. The second problem is that the system costs twice as much as the next runner up. For these reasons alone it is foolhardy to immediately claim that Linux is now the undisputed heavyweight champion of the database world.
However, the story is more than that. The most important thing to notice is not that Linux is at the top, or the number of processors is so high, or even that the cost is exorbitant. The important thing is the Linux is a contender at all. This is an OS that hasn't until recently gotten a lot of respect. That Linux can "keep up with the big boys", it shows that it is certainly capable of handling the computing needs of the corporate community.
Of course, if you live by the benchmark, you die by the benchmark. Linux apologists would do well to acknowledge that it only breaks the world record because the hardware is twice as powerful as the next OS's. However, they can still crow about the significant progress that Linux has made over its relatively short lifetime. What other OS has gone from 0 to 60 in such a short time?
Dancin Santa