RE: Oracle's Updates Subscription Service

[Mohan, Ross]

Title: RE: Oracle's Updates Subscription Service

Walt,

 

Love that last line. But, i'll resist the temptation to bite the bait.

 

For you other stuff, i've embedded some newbie comments

below...stuff you've likely seen, heard, or thought about before.

 

thx

 

Ross

-----Original Message-----
From: Weaver, Walt [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2001 3:27 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Subject: RE: Oracle's Updates Subscription Service

It's the transaction/activity rate that causes MySQL to go in the tank. Our products are web applications and some of our hosted sites see hundreds of thousands of hits a day. There are a few tables in our main application that are constantly being updated by each hit (web page request). Since MySQL has table-level locking only, performance can tank during peak periods. 

 

||  Can mild db/application changes be made to "spread the pain"? e.g. instead of updating "THE" , "order" table, 

    add a key ( or use an existing one!) to manually partition the table by date...by region...by product type....by

    order type...by *customer*.....or by more than one of the preceding....then, "after hours", you can coalesce all

    the "region" tables back into one big grandaddy.

 

OR

 

|| if it really is just a few tables, have you thoroughly investigated Solid State Disk?  You can get some

    incredible speed ups there....at a minimum, it can buy you time to do your app/db tweaks.... 

 

In addition, since MySQL has no concept of a transaction or rollback, data corruption is a constant problem.  

 

||  Huh?  Semantic corruption due to lack of developer transaction control is one thing. Actual, physical corruption

is a CONTROLLER or DISK problem. Or izzit something else? Your developers should be able to manage

transactions on the client, hell, all Oracle does is put x-action control in the db so the developers need to

think less ( "less", not "not at all") about it......  If you are talking about a hardware problem, you gotta fix

that...if it is semantic..i.e. code stepping on 'in flight' data, have a real sit down with your developers.....

 

 We have a cron job that runs isamchk on a regular basis for our larger customers to try and nip the corruption problems in the bud. Nevertheless, our Hosting Sysadmins spend a good portion of each day fixing MySQL corruption problems. 

 

|| i don't have the knowledge to parse this, or to relate it to the foregoing....

 

 

Fortunately our product has an Oracle API, so we've moved a number of our larger customers to Oracle. Their site performance is a bit slower overall -- our products are "optimized" for MySQL -- but their performance no longer completely tanks during peak periods and there is no data corruption at all. 

 

||  ok......

 

So now we've decided to ramp up our Oracle usage (this is one of the reasons I was hired) but since we are a young and relatively cash-poor company the Mucky-mucks are hesitant about Oracle's cost. But then we show them what MySQL is doing to our hosting environment and they become stressed out about losing customers. The "between a rock and a hard place" scenario has sent them into paroxysms of fear, because they realize they might actually have to quit using free stuff and start spending money to keep up with the growing demand for the company's products. They long for the good old days of a couple of years ago when there were no customers, lots of venture capital, and the newly-created products ran great on E-machines, Linux, and MySQL.

 

I guess you can say that we're suffering through the pain of transitioning from an internet startup to a mature, growing company with a seemingly bright future. It is not unlike going through puberty. 

 

||  The metaphor seems to indicate that as we get older, our hardware and uptime increase. <EG> 

 

I, of course, seem to have skipped the maturation process altogether and like most males my age I am not young, but am still immature. I rather enjoy it.

 

--Walt Weaver

  Bozeman, Montana, USA

-----Original Message-----
From: Mohan, Ross [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2001 8:15 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Subject: RE: Oracle's Updates Subscription Service

Interesting stuff. (Especially about the ruminants.)   When you say mysql does not scale,

have you run into hard walls? if so, what is the data size, or is it the transaction/activity rate

that tanks....i'd be interested in hearing where, if at all, you are "hitting the knee".

 

I'd love to get out there someday. Absolutely beautiful country.....

 

thanks for the snapshot!

-----Original Message-----
From: Weaver, Walt [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2001 1:01 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Subject: RE: Oracle's Updates Subscription Service

Well Ross, Our campus is out in the country (just about everywhere in Montana is out in the country) and we are, indeed, surrounded by docile ruminants. I'd like to say that during our off-time we go out and gaze lovingly at their udders, but there are other things we prefer to gaze at lovingly.

 

Of course, we have no problems doing online dairy backups around here. :>)

 

We use MySQL here and yes it's tunable. There's even word out on the street that soon MySQL may support the concept of a transaction. What a concept.

 

MySQL has its place, but it's causing us no end of pain here. It doesn't scale well enough to support what we're doing. That's why we're painfully biting the bullet and paying the big bucks for Oracle.

 

--Walt Weaver

  Bozeman, Montana, USA

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Mohan, Ross [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2001 8:51 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Subject: RE: Oracle's Updates Subscription Service

Walt, you have just shattered my picture of you as a gentle man
surrounded by docile ruminants, never uddering a discouraging word.

Yes, it's amazing, the price of the software. My line to folks
is: "For your money, Oracle is the best database...if it were my
money, it would be almost anything but.."

MySQL *is* tunable.....could be fun....

-----Original Message-----
From: Weaver, Walt [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2001 10:21 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Subject: Oracle's Updates Subscription Service

Say, is it just me or has the cost of the Updates Subscription Service gone
up considerably in the past six months or so?

We're currently pricing out what it'll cost us to purchase 8.1.7 Standard
Edition and the numbers we're getting are a heck of a lot higher than they
were in November.

Has the cost of CD-ROM's gone up that much? Is the economy now in an
inflationary period? Where's Allen Greenspan when you need him?

Whatever happened to those hazy, golden, halcyon days when upgrades were
included in product support?

Sometimes, Oracle just sucks. I'm seriously considering getting on track for
a MySQL certification.   :>)

--Walt Weaver
  Bozeman, Montana, USA
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