My RDBMS is better than you RDBMS?

Hi.

I've done some simple benchmarks for Oracle, DB2, SQL Server and Access (for a laugh). For basic operations like a few thousand inserts, updates or queries the products in order of speed from fastest to slowest were:

Access
SQL Server
DB2
Oracle

Once you start dealing with tables much bigger than 10,000 rows you start to see:

Access
DB2
Oracle
SQL Server

If you take into account multiple users and locking you get:

DB2
Oracle
SQL Server
Access

If you increase the complexity of the queries you get:

Oracle
DB2
SQL Server
Access (Can't perform some complex queries)

These bench marks are crappy and I wouldn't quote them as being definitive, but you should try them out for yourself if you can. It gives you a clearer perspective when people start the old "my RDBMS is better than your RDBMS" debate.

Turns out, for something small with few users Access is the fastest choice. Not surprising really since it's not bogged down with needless complexity.

For small to mid multiuser systems SQL Server is the fastest and cheapest alternative. If you think your system might grow over time you may need to consider something bigger?

Very big DBs with simple queries are best served by DB2, although Oracle is very close in terms of performance.

Anything big and complex is best served by Oracle.

Food for thought!

you should try mysql for selects :D

Pando, what's your experience of mySQL? Do you like it? What sort of applications have you used it for? Did it's limitations bug the hell out of you?

I had a play around with mySQL a few months ago but found it very frustrating. It didn't support subselects, foreign keys, views, stored procedures, unions, triggers, constraints etc. In addition it's locking mechanism was laughable and the list of things to-do read like "What a real RDBMS should have but we've not put in yet!"

http://www.mysql.com/documentation/m...tion.html#TODO

The mySQL documentation makes me want to try PostgreSQL. Read the second half of this section:

http://www.mysql.com/documentation/m...are_PostgreSQL

Cheers

We done performance benchmark on Oracle, SQLServer and DB2 database using the same version of application, tp, os, server and same set of performance data. There are very little difference between those databases. The more noticeable difference is the scalability. Oracle and DB2 are more scalable.

However, there is one thing people always overlook. DB2 has more overhead in maintenance. You need to compile all your programs as packages and create the package in the database. If there is any change in the program code, you need to recompile and recreate the DB2 package. The package is how DB2 improves its performance.

So I still prefer Oracle over DB2 and SQLServer is not on my list as it does not run on Unix. :)

Since the MySQL topic had come up here. I have been looking for the MySQL architecture information and so far I haven't found one. There were some suggestions to look into the source code, but I don't have any patience to look into it, provided that is the one and the only way.

So comming to the point, does any one know of any links or white papers that would talk about the MySQL architecture?

Very very curious.

Sam

Talking of benchmarking the RDBMS..

I still rememebr Oracle's million dollar chalange to SQL Server a couple of years ago..

Sanjay