[TriLUG] Interesting article: Ellison: Linux will wipe Microsoft out of the data center

[Rob Huffstedtler]

I went about it the hard way.  Way back in the day, we couldn't get a
relational DB to perform well enough on the hardware we could afford (an
off-brand Sparc 20 that ran *everything* except mail and DNS for us) - so we wrote our own solution using gdbm files to
store the data and plain text indices (which we grepped) to get at it.
Needless to say, insert/update performance was abyssmal, but reads were
fast, and that was all we really cared about.

So, when msql development stalled out (it was a piece of crap anyway),
and the first stable release of mysql was available, we could afford
some better hardware (three super-fast dual PPro 200s with 128MB each),
and we decided to try porting the app to MySQL.  It worked out pretty
well for us, but it meant that I had to really learn SQL, and really
learn about relational DB design (there's a good book by two women whose
names I forget called Handbook of Relational Database Design).  So, once
I learned all that, then I was ready to start tackling the more DBAish
things like performance tuning.

I actually had some classes when I started using "real" databases later,
like Informix, but once you get the concepts down, it's pretty much the
same from one to another - you just have to learn how they handle
storing stuff (cooked files or raw devices), how each dbms does its
transaction logs, how you do backups and restores, how the use of a db
affects its performance (e.g. for most web backends where you do a bulk
load of the majority of the data, you really don't care too much about
inserts and updates, but selects have to respond super quick - so you
can go crazy with indices) and so on.

That said, in 7 years I would say that 90% of the performance issues I
have seen have been poor db design or bad queries.  When that happens,
there is a limit to how much improvement you will get from performance
tuning. 

On Thu, Apr 03, 2003 at 03:07:29PM -0500, Roy Vestal wrote:
> Okey, so I'm getting an overwhelming sound to learn Postgres, as well as
> some saying learn Oracle. How should a non-xDB admin person start? Any
> suggestions on learning the basics?
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rob Huffstedtler" <rob at bagpipe.com>
> To: <trilug at trilug.org>
> Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2003 2:30 PM
> Subject: Re: [TriLUG] Interesting article: Ellison: Linux will wipe
> Microsoft out of the data center
> 
> 
> > Postgres.
> >
> > MySQL is still lacking way too many features that are crucial to
> > understand to be a good DBA.
> >
> > On Thu, Apr 03, 2003 at 11:06:52AM -0500, Roy Vestal wrote:
> > > Here's a question: to learn the basics of db admin, should I use MySQL,
> or
> > > Posgres?
> >      http://www.trilug.org/~lovelace/faq/TriLUG-faq.html
> > _______________________________________________
> > TriLUG mailing list
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> > TriLUG Organizational FAQ:
> >     http://www.trilug.org/~lovelace/faq/TriLUG-faq.html
> >
> >
> 
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