Providing an unparalleled demonstration of decision support power, e-commerce leaders Sun Microsystems and Oracle recently announced the world's first three-terabyte Transaction Processing Council (TPC-H) result.
3TB of data is approximately equal to the amount of information contained in almost 30 kilometres of stacked books.
The TPC-H result was obtained on a 3TB data warehouse, the largest ever certified for a TPC-H benchmark. The Transaction Processing Council notes that the size of the database is a primary determinant of results, and, as such, this benchmark provides an unparalleled demonstration of decision support power.
The size and scope of a three-terabyte decision support benchmark result greatly surpasses the size and scope of the previous record TPC-H benchmark of only one terabyte held by IBM. No other vendor has published results for a TPC-H benchmark of this magnitude.
This result clearly illustrates Oracle's and Sun's leadership in delivering the most demanding applications for very large databases (VLDB) on the fastest database and high-end server in the industry.
"Sun's vision to work in association with partners like Oracle, who are global leaders, to deliver pre-integrated solutions while simultaneously simplifying the technology, clearly provides massive scalable results," says Tertius Bezuidenhout, SA national systems engineer manager at Sun Microsystems SA.
This new standard was achieved running Oracle9i Database on two Sun Enterprise 10000 (E10k) servers, also known as StarFire, with a total of 128 processors.
"This world-record setting benchmark result is proof that Oracle running on Sun's StarFire system today can scale the largest volumes of data and workloads," comments Bezuidenhout.
"Sun and Oracle's performance on the TPC-H benchmark demonstrates the continued commitment to delivering real-world performance results which can easily be measured," he says. "Sun's StarFire server maintains its position as the fastest high-end server in the industry, delivering reliability and scalability unmatched by other vendor's high-end systems."
Data warehouse and business intelligence applications are characterised by very complex, ad-hoc queries running against very large amounts of data. The Oracle database offers a rich variety of query processing techniques that deliver the superior performance required when accessing enormous amounts of stored data.
The benchmark leveraged many key Oracle database features for scalable multi-node performance, including Internode Parallel Query, Automatic Parallel Tuning, and Partition-wise Joins.
"Oracle can deliver scalability to handle databases supporting multiple terabytes while at the same time delivering rapid response to complex queries," says Chuck Rozwat, Oracle executive vice president of Server Technologies.
"Today, Oracle and Sun's StarFire together on a single node can support multiple terabytes. This benchmark demonstrates how, using clustering, Oracle and Sun provide transparent scalability for any data warehouse as a company's data repository grows."
The Sun Enterprise 10000 systems, combined with Sun Cluster software and Sun StorEdge solutions and running Oracle 9.0.1 software and Solaris 8 Operating Environment software, were configured for this benchmark with a total of 128 gigabytes of memory.
The StarFire servers, combined with Sun Cluster software, deliver high availability through automatic fault detection and recovery, and provide mainframe-class reliability and scalability for data warehousing in support of mixed workloads such as e-commerce, ERP, CRM, and other mission-critical applications and services.
The system's 23.8 terabytes of storage was attained using Sun StorEdge solutions including the multi-platform Sun StorEdge T3 arrays, Sun StorEdge A5200 fibre-channel arrays and Sun StorEdge D1000 boot drive devices. The comprehensive Sun StorEdge family of products helps enable customers to match storage to the application while providing scalable capacity and performance.
The result was accomplished by achieving a stunning 10,764.7 QphH@3000GB with a price performance of $1,222/QphH@3000GB and an availability date of June 19, 2001.
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