> A reference was made to Oracle/DB2/WebSphere being resource > intensive "Then, the big stuff started to become available. > DB2, Oracle, Websphere. One copy can take multiple IFL engines .." > > My follow up question on this is: in terms of resource > requirements, would you treat MySQL as being roughly > equivalent to Oracle/DB2?
It is directly proportional to what you *do* with them. Oracle idling is not a resource hog at all - Linux and VM page it out nicely and life goes on happily. MySQL is certainly lighter-weight than Oracle, but only by virtue of usually being applied to smaller, less heavily-trafficed applications. A application that is really hammering on a MySQL server can take up 10 G6 engines for the database without blinking (I've seen it done in a sustained manner) and if you really get cooking, MySQL will eat a 32-way Regatta and still be looking for more MIPS to use. To be clear, there are no neat x*A=y*B generalizations here. If you want to be successful in hosting services on this platform, measurement on a specific workload is necessary to get a useful answer. (BTW, this is true for *any* virtualization solution, including VMWare, Xen, Solaris containers, HP vPARs, pSeries LPARs, etc. Shared resource systems are a very different animal than the distributed systems world has seen in a generation or so, and we've all but lost the skills to evaluate resource utilization in any meaningful way in that area). > And JBoss roughly equivalent to WebSphere? See above. WebSphere is usually a hog because it tries to be everything to everybody, and (for most people) ends up carrying a lot of baggage that most people never use around as a result. An idle Websphere takes about 4-5 times the resources of a idle Jboss -- unless you have an application that really does some work in that Jboss, in which case it quickly grows to approximately the same mass and bulk. What you *do* with Jboss determines how resource intensive it is. To venture out on a limb a bit, the two are probably not comparable in any case -- Jboss has a much smaller set of included primitive functions than Websphere. It depends on whether you're optimizing for developer convenience, or application performance in a shared resource environment. Websphere does not play particularly nicely in a shared resource environment UNLESS there is some conscious thought on the behalf of the system administrator AND the software designer to make it do so. Note emphasis: it takes BOTH developer and admin skills to make WAS on zLinux (or in fact WAS on any 390/zSeries OS) work and scale well. It can be done, but you have to be intentional and disciplined about it. I know of shops that develop on Websphere, and then deploy on Jboss to partially avoid this problem -- it forces them to consciously use only the Websphere features and functions that they actually *need* (thus identifying the appropriate WAS Java runtime elements to get moved into the Jboss containers), rather than just dragging the entire world into every application and taking the bloat of the full WAS environs where it isn't needed. This also optimizes their software development cost by a significant margin. > I understand with DB2 > there is the option to use DB2 Connect, an option MySQL > doesn't allow for. MySQL has remote access capability. So does Postgres. So does kdb. You just don't use DB2/Connect or any of the DB/2 native methods to get to it (which can be considered a plus, unless you're trying to interface with z/OS applications). There's even ODBC capability for all of the above so the Windows folks can connect directly. The native Linux environments using MySQL have perfectly good remote access libraries for all the major development languages (C, C++, Perl, Python, Java, Fortran, etc, etc), and there are even good database-independent access libraries for most of the above (plugins handle the abstract -> specific interface). :idea. I've often considered writing a CMS or z/OS front-end that could be linked as a replacement for the DB2-specific interface in the existing CMS/zOS environs to these database-independent routines; I think it would be a major benefit to Civilization As We Know it if we could finally kill off the shambling corpse that is DB2/VM and replace it with something halfway modern. We already run the database in a separate virtual machine that isn't CMS-based anyway; why should we care if that engine gets replaced with something Linux-based if the interfaces are the same? (ISVs or people interested: My idea! Mine! Talk to me off-list if this sounds interesting or you'd like to codevelop.) :eidea. > So I appreciate its hard to compare directly. I would substitute "almost impossible" for "hard". We are comparing fundamentally different environments, optimized for completely different performance characteristics and goals. Let's change the question somewhat: what workloads do *you* propose to run in the environment? That'd probably give us a better idea of what you're trying to do and how it will scale. Are we talking about WWW hosting, or application hosting, or ??? Pick a couple hypothetical scenarios and let's give those a go. -- db ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
