Conference ulysse::rdb_vms_competition

554.0. "ORACLE V6 DECUS Seminar" by TRCO01::MCMULLEN () Mon Jan 29 1990 19:38

I attended an Oracle V6 for VAX/VMS session at Canadian DECUS last week. 
There were approximately 65 people in attendance. Only 3 people out of the 65
have received their V6 copy of Oracle! All the rest are still running
V5.x. Most customers have not recieved V6. Most Oracle people in the Toronto 
office have not learned V6 yet.

The Oracle software specialist stated that it is not a simple update from
V5 to V6. He said it is a conversion. Some of the reasons stated for converting
to V6 were not just for performance. Oracle stated that V5 had no tools for
tuning the database; while V6 gives a methodology and some tools for performance
tuning. Basic message was better performance, features and tools.

Oracle's tuning methodology starts with the SQL statements: Tuning the
application will give you the greatest performance gains for the least effort. I
belive they are refering to things like: make sure all queries use an index, 
proper usage of GROUP BY etc. There was an overhead that showed the report 
from one of the tools that collected transaction statistics. The report was 
easy to read. It would be nice if Rdb/VMS engineering could format the output 
of the "debug flags", thus making the output easier to read and compare.

Many customer's complained vigorously about the "position dependent code". They
all complained about the need to compile and link everything for every Oracle 
software release. Oracle did not promise when this would change.

The Oracle software specialist was talking (while I was talking to someone else
thus I did not catch it all) about a potential performance issue. I believe he
said that if any KEYS hash to the same lock value, then all other rows with the 
same hash value are locked. Does anyone know more about this?

Two customer's complained about the lack of a BATCH mode. Even with only a 
single process accessing the database, the overhead of the REDO log must be
incurred. There is no option to turn it off.

After the session I talked to the specialist (ex-DEC) and he mentioned that 
sales of Oracle are off in Toronto and that Oracle Canada is starting to 
experience a lot of turnover. 
                                                                
    Ken McMullen

    I thought oracle experienced a lot of turnover as part of normal
    business activity....
    
    Is it turning over *more* now in canada..?
    

�  After the session I talked to the specialist (ex-DEC) and he mentioned that 
�sales of Oracle are off in Toronto and that Oracle Canada is starting to 
�experience a lot of turnover. 

    You're breakin' mah heart... 
    
 -Bruce