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NZX Moves To Oracle On Linux
sn00ker writes "In this story in The New Zealand Herald, we learn that the NZX stock exchange has moved their database systems to Oracle running on RedHat Linux, running on commodity Intel-based hardware. What's really impressive are the performance numbers they're claiming. Quoth the article, "One key query - searching the data on historical trades to identify maximum trade values - has been cut from 36 seconds to 0.03 seconds." An improvement of over 1000 times is spectacular in anybody's books, and is one hell of a boost for the proponents of Linux at the back-end of the financial world."
As slashdot only accepts conspiracies for posting this has never really be disseminated:
The NZX (ex NZSE) runs the Computershare ASTS trading system for their equities and bond trading. They have done so for 4 years.
This system runs under Linux (Redhat) on Compaq machines.
That they aggregated some of their databases and achieved better performance is non news but the increase in performance stated is worth a conspiracy post!
I have achieved increases of 10^4 and 10^6 in production systems by recoding a small critical part of an application (usually less than a page of code).
Most of the time the problem is stupid code or operational ignorance. Rarely is hardware, O/S or data base software changes the sole or main solution in performance problems. Hardware is only a factor when the system is underspecified to save money.
Given that they consolidated 21 databases into a single database the problem could simply have been network latency between separate physical servers.
The simplest way to get performance problems is to test on developers personal machines with tiny test databases and implement without full scale testing.
For those of you who wish to ensure that Microsoft SQL server is slow, invoke a user defined function as part of the where clause that the optimizer cannot recognize as a determinate function when joining two tables. This will ensure a nested loop join that will take an eternity.
When I was young, I had to rub sticks together to compute.
What the Oracle guy said was key, that if a software company can target a restricted range of kit, rather than every possible third party gizmo and buggy driver that can be installed under Windows, they've got a vastly easier job.
For some software applications it makes sense to refuse to ship the software on its own and insist on giving away free hardware with the deal, with the operating system of your choice (it isn't really going to matter which operating system) fully configured and installed. That way you know what the client is running your software on, you've tested it, and you've got an identical setup back in the lab to research problems on, and you know it isn't going to crash because the client's box is running some crap driver you've never heard of.