[Info-vax] Oracle Database vs Oracle/Rdb

[IanD]

RDB monitor is awesome, I believe it's better than Toad

Oracle supported on the fly index rebuilding without having to take the DB down, something that RDB never properly mastered

Snapshots were constantly a PITA with RDB. Snapshot truncation came very late in the piece and still caused issues because they only ever grow, they never shrink unless your force them

Index drops of mix page storage areas also was painful

I don't know why RDB could never get 100% guaranteed clean database backup starts happening. How many times over the years did RDB fail to acquire a quiet point

Having to do an export/import to change I think the database page size also was never modernised to be a dynamic operation. Our database was simply too large to do an export/import in a given database window

RDB's revolving aij's, emergency journals were ahead of their time

The RDB optimiser I believe was the first of it's type in the world? Being able to then force the DB to use a query outline versus internal strategies was also amazing

Most of the goodies around I/O performance through storage mapping and storage placement went away with faster disks, SAN etc but what impressed me was how much optimisation you could do within RDB and tricks it used, like spam pages, mixed pages etc, all seemingly born out of a need to overcome bottlenecks probably encountered over the years

Faster CPU speeds, huge memory servers, fast I/O seems to have removed the need to go down to such fine levels of performance tweaking now

Now Oracle say they have a total self maintaining database environment now, no need for a systems DBA anymore (of course you need to have everything in their DB environment and conforming to their standard) but on paper it looks good

RDB engineers were smart fellows, but Oracle loves Oracle and they originally believed the two databases would merge but quickly found out that dream was never going to happen, they are fundamentally too different in the engine room

RDB doesn't see much in the way of huge advancements anymore (I stopped looking at the release feature sets a few years back)

Maybe they might sell it to VSI but I suspect they would rather it just died and went to DB heaven and it's customers embraced it's first love, Oracle

Any word if Oracle is going to bother with a port of RDB to x86?
Wasn't RDB V8 running or partially running on Windows NT?
(Too long ago to remember)