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."

Comments

Linux?

[Dr Rick]

"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."

Oh come on! They consolidated 21 databases and moved to Oracle. That's why it is 1000 times faster. The move to Linux is a footnote as far as the performance issue is concerned -- as stated in the article, the move to Linux was for cost. I'm sure Solaris or god help me, Windows Server 2003 would have given similar performance results. Now if they had moved to MySQL...

Re:Linux?

[killjoe]

The article is a bit short on details. There is no mention of the previous hardware or software for example. Did they move from 21 SQL servers running on windows to 1 oracle running on linux? Maybe they just got rid of a bunch of aging unix machines and build a cluster of intel servers running linux.

Either way though the fact that a major exchange is running linux is big news. Their database is their life and they are trusting it to linux. That says a lot.

Re:Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

So perhaps it's time we coin a new term here. anti-FUD? I love Linux, but it's been obvious to me from the get go over four years ago now that pro-Linux articles and pro-Linux users sometimes stretch the truth or slightly warp reality to make it seam better than it is. There is no doubt...Linux is better than MS anything in my mind...but come on let's be realists and scientific here...not religious. Linux needs to win on factual merits...not more marketing gimicks that look a lot like those latest MS Office comercials that give it's users joy gasms.

Slashdot: fair and balanced

[Anonymous Coward]

A 1000 fold improvement in performance, just by moving to linux. Incredible. Unbelievable even.

Comon guys. What kind of idiots do you take us for?

Ja, ja

[trifakir]

There are even more impressive results with Kdb by Kx Systems.

Financial organizations are very conservative but even Deutsche Bank are migrating to Linux some of their less important processes.

In all the cases the future of the financial industry is in cheap linux clusters.

Re:A pretty telling statement in there...

[Soko]

I doubt they're your garden variety "OMG BillG iz teh debil" Loonix fanbois, friend.

They are a serious enterprise, and there must be a reason something as provocative as " not just because we hated Microsoft" would come out in an interview.

IOW - It's likley that Microsoft's products and/or policies have left a very, very bad impression with these people, and they're glad that they have a compeditor with which to smack Microsoft in the head with.

Soko

Linux at the back-end of the financial world."

[elucubra]

C'mon, it ain't nice to call NZ that!

10^3 performance increase.. No big deal....

[aauu]

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.