[rescue] Re: Being jobless

[Clayton Wheeler]

On Monday, Jul 28, 2003, at 10:10 US/Pacific, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:

> On a related note, what about other "enterprise grade" databases like
> SAP DB, or Firebird.  Both appear to have much enterprise usage...
>
> Anyone tried any of them on nice beefy SMP machines (particularly, 
> Irix,
> Solaris, or HP-UX)?

I've used Firebird's predecessor, Interbase, on a 2- or 4-CPU (I forget 
now) Sun E450. It can run multi-threaded, and seemed to be reasonable 
at taking advantage of an SMP system, but as a database it's not very 
impressive. The optimizer is Just Plain Dumb, and database corruption 
seems to be its favorite hobby. The machine it ran on had a history of 
weird problems, so bad hardware may have been a factor, but there's a 
knowledge base article with a list of frighteningly trivial ways to 
corrupt your database. Hopefully the Firebird guys have improved it 
since they got it.

For an el cheapo database server, I would be inclined to run Sybase 
11.0.3.3; it seems to be a little-known fact that Sybase has made this 
release freely available for i386 Linux and FreeBSD. While it's not all 
up-to-date, it's fairly easy to administer and certainly an 
enterprise-class database. If you had quality i386 hardware, it would 
probably do nicely.

-- 
Clayton Wheeler
csw at thirdshoe.net