Summary of Request for Comparison of Altos and NCR

[Greg Pavlov]

In article <505 at wybbs.mi.org> sleepy at wybbs.UUCP (Mike Faber) writes:
>
>Thank you.  I've been saying (to my boss mostly) that the disk speed and 
>quantity are the REAL deciding factors in a resonably designed system.
>In my opinion, the only thing you need a CPU for in a typical DBMS computer
>is to direct traffic, and make an occasional computation here and there.
>

  I don't buy that.  Once again, this is probably one of those "it depends on
  your application..." issues.  But if one has large tables on which one per-
  forms complex joins, the cpu has a lot of work to do, well beyond the 
  "occasional computation here and there...".  Computation is the least of it;
  it's the compares and other functions related to selecting the correct data
  that takes all the time, in such applications.  This is especially true if
  one has chosen his/her keys and indices carefully and accesses a good query
  optimizer (such as INGRES's, prior to Version 6...)

   greg pavlov, fstrf, amherst, ny
   pavlov at stewart.fstrf.org
   716-834-0900