System News for Sun Users - The Blog

An Edison Group Comparative Management Costs Study

A recent study conducted by the Edison Group titled “Comparative Management Costs Study—Oracle Database 11g vs. IBM DB2 Enterprise 9.5″ quantifies how Oracle widens the manageability lead against IBM. Points made in the 78-page report: 43% annual savings in database management; typical administrative functions are 40% faster; 49% fewer steps for the same set of standard RDBMS tasks; and save up to $35,155 per year per DBA.

(Get More Information . .)

Low-end Server Sales Rise, While High-end Systems Fall

The headline for IDC’s press release on the 4Q09 server market sums things up nicely: “Worldwide Server Market Rebounds Sharply in Fourth Quarter as Demand for Blades and x86 Systems Leads the Way.” Gartner found that while the worldwide server market recovered in the second half of 2009 from the economic downturn, plummeting sales in high-end systems resulted in a decline in overall revenue in the fourth quarter.

(Get More Information . .)

One Billion Transistors, 16 SPARC Cores Combined in a Single SoC

Sun’s Niagara 3, a one billion-transistor, 16-core processor, and the IBM POWER7 are the subject of Jon Stokes’s Ars Technica piece that introduces readers to the floorplan of both chips. 

(Get More Information . .)

Sometimes Oracle Database Just Does It Better than SQL

Handling application changes of state is a capability that Oracle Database outshines SQL at, contends Bruce Hopkins in his Sun Developer Network article “Creating High-Performance Database Applications with Java Triggers and the Oracle Database.” What Hopkins offers here is a means for developers to completely eliminate the necessity for polling databases for state changes by using Java triggers in the Oracle database that handle state changes by themselves.

(Get More Information . .)

Just the Ticket for Rapidly Growing Company

StubHub, an eBay affiliate, and the world’s largest ticket marketplace, upgraded a mission-critical, online transaction processing (OLTP) database from Oracle 9i Real Application Clusters (RAC) to Oracle 10g RAC. To take advantage of high scalability and mainframe-class performance, StubHub also moved the database from a 32-bit platform to a 64-bit platform with Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System.

(Get More Information . .)

Despite Decline in Third Quarter Sales

Server sales are beginning to stabilize, reports IDC and Gartner in analyses on the July-September period. The IT research and advisory firms both found revenue down in the worldwide server market during the third quarter of 2009, however the decrease was less than anticipated and demonstrated an increase over the first and second quarters of this year.

(Get More Information . .)

Sun SEC Filing Reports Planned Job Cuts

The European Union (EU) confirmed that Oracle President Safra Catz met with EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes for negotiations over the company’s acquisition of Sun, which disclosed in a SEC filing this week that it plans on cutting up to 3,000 jobs due to the delay in the acquisition.

(Get More Information . .)

Oracle Offers Companies $10M in Performance Challenge

A new world record TPC-C benchmark result has been set for Oracle Database 11g running on Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 servers with CMT technology, along with Solaris 10 and the new Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array. Oracle reports this world record proves that the Oracle-Sun combination runs faster than IBM DB2 running on IBM’s flagship Power 595. Oracle believes so much in Sun hardware, it is offering companies $10 million if one can prove Oracle Database 11g runs at least twice as fast on IBM’s fastest computer.

(Get More Information . .)

Regarding SPARC, Solaris, Sun Hardware

Sun customers wanting to know just exactly what Oracle plans on doing with SPARC, Solaris, and Sun hardware are advised to visit the Oracle Web site where the business software company has published a short and concise list of statements regarding the future of these Sun-related technologies.

(Get More Information . .)

Sun Fire Server and Oracle Database Top IBM, HP/Microsoft

The Sun Fire X4270 server and the Oracle 10g have set a world-record result for a two-processor system on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark, outperforming IBM System 550 server and DB2 as well as HP ProLiant BL460c G6 and Microsoft SQL Server. The two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark measures the system performance to process dialog steps and order line item postings per hour for SAP solution-based transactions.

(Get More Information . .)