LoTR , Linux, and Database Management

minus23 writes: "Very interesting article over at Digitalanimators.com, talking about some of the challenges faced by the crew working on the second installment in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Interesting bits include managing an off-site database of 45TBs, Linux workstations from IBM, 1400 processors, and the animation methods to be used on Gollum. It's a good thing. :)"

Comments

Amazing!

[SpatchMonkey]

All that computing power just to make the characters in LoTR look like old-style puppets!

Re:Excuses to talk about OSS RDBMSs

[Anonymous Coward]

Since then, I've been slowly, carefully, calmly trying to see if Postgres (and incidentally, MySQL) were ready for production databases.

Turns out, the answer is pretty much YES for Postgres and, sorry folks, still NO for MySQL.

Well from my experience, we tested PostgreSQL, Nusphere MySQL, and MSSQL on our application which places a high transactional load on the DB. I wrote a tool to stress test all 3 of the databases using the kind of queries in the application over about 7-10day period.

The results where as follows:
MySQL: ran fine with small databases and was the fastest of the 3, but it kept falling over every 3-5 days under simulation wiht databases around 1gig plus.

PostgreSQL: We wasted the most time with this DB in tweaking it on our hardware. Once we got it running it didn't crash and it handled a concurrent load of 30-40 connections well. Once we increased that number to 50-60 the DB crawled pretty much to a halt. Under this load it was taking 20-30sec to bring back simple select queries.

MSSQL: We ended up running with MSSQL becuase it took the load, didn't crash and although it would have been the slower than the other two, it remained consistant under high load and concurrency.

Once again Microsoft is better than OSS!