[Info-vax] Oracle Database vs Oracle/Rdb

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-06-22 05:29:17 +0000, DTL said:

> And what about response time?
> Could OracleDB access be slower? Why?
> The Customer has Integrity/iTanium servers/OpenVMS-i64 8.2.

TL;DR: Try it.

Long answer:  Whether you'll do better with Oracle Rdb or Oracle 
Classic performance?  You'll have to run some tests of that using your 
particular app and database designs.  See where Oracle Rdb is limited 
and whether that can be tuned, and see how Oracle Classic performs for 
the same tasks and whether that can be tuned.  I've seen better, and 
I've seen worse.

I'd generally expect better performance and with less effort and with 
lower expenditures and with less disruption with an OpenVMS upgrade and 
with a hardware upgrade.   There were substantial performance 
improvements made to the OpenVMS I64 releases, and the "newer" Itanium 
hardware is faster than what was available back in the V8.2 era.  
Replacing HDDs with SSDs, and adding RAM, and rolling out i4- or 
i6-class hardware will almost certainly relocate any existing database 
performance problems to other sorts of performance problems elsewhere 
in the local stack.  That's if performance is the goal.

Upgrading to more current hardware and more current software will 
likely be cheaper and easier than porting from Oracle Rdb to Oracle 
Classic.  And with a more certain payback in better performance, too.

Upgrading the Integrity server hardware will require OpenVMS upgrades.  
OpenVMS I64 V8.2 is very old and very rough, long unsupported, and not 
a release I'd recommend running in production.  Here, either HPE 
OpenVMS I64 V8.4 with patches, or VSI OpenVMS I64 V8.4-2L1 with patches.

If this migration to Oracle Classic is part of an overarching plan to 
move this app and this environment to another platform, I'd start work 
on that in preference to what is probably a lateral move from Oracle 
Rdb to Oracle Classic.

If this migration is about consolidating on one database, then remember 
that the available Oracle Classic on OpenVMS I64 is fairly old. Which 
might cause some wrinkles with these efforts, if this is a discussion 
around consolidating onto fewer databases and eventually toward hosting 
or re-hosting or migrating or remotely-accessing the databases, or 
toward related distributed database management and distributed 
processing.

But as for your which-of-these-has-better-performance question?  I 
doubt anybody can answer it in less than hand-waving generalities.  Not 
without profiling and prototyping the particular app designs and app 
limits here.



-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC