Re: what does "serialization" mean?

From: Nick Landsberg (SPAMhukolauTRAP_at_SPAMworldnetTRAP.att.net)
Date: 07/07/04 

Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2004 22:23:48 GMT

Edward G. Nilges wrote:

> Nick Landsberg <SPAMhukolauTRAP@SPAMworldnetTRAP.att.net> wrote in message news:<z1cGc.195749$Gx4.117997@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net>...
>
>>Edward G. Nilges wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Corey Murtagh <emonk@slingshot.no.uce> wrote in message news:<1088977185.694628@radsrv1.tranzpeer.net>...
>>>
>>
>>[MUCH SNIPPAGE, just want to reply to one small point]
>>
>>
>>>Damn straight and why the hell not? Entire businesses such as Wal
>>>Mart, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and countless others did not exist
>>>prior to the availability of powerful servers powered mostly by
>>>Microsoft software, and not incompatible versions of Linux.
>>>
>>
>>I don't know about the rest, but I do know that as of 10
>>years or so ago, the Wal Mart database was hosted on a Teradata
>
>
> So? First of all, many of these large servers are today dinosaurs.
> What part of Moore's law don't you understand?

So? What part of Newtonian physics don't you understand?

The response time of large database systems is
dominated by the rate at which data can be
fetched off disk. Since disks are physical
devices which are subject to things like
intertia, momentum and rotational latency,
they don't obey the so-called Moore's Law.
Average access times for Disk I/O to a single
disk have only increased by a factor of roughly
5 during the last 25 years. (Certain RAID technology
has improved this by another factor of about
2.5, but even so, that's roughly only an order
of magnitude in 25 years.) This kind of data
(about the physical world in which the CPU's
do their work) should be common knowledge
among people who claim to be "software engineers"
or "computer scientists" (IMO). "Moore's
Law" is irrelevant in this case.

I don't believe
> Microsoft's puffery as regards the ability of large Windows 2000
> servers in all cases, but there's a grain of truth. The efficiencies
> of a ten-year old Teradata are today inapplicable to the
> price/performance equation.
>
> Furthermore, the data is useless if it can't be accessed, and like it
> or not this is primarily through Windows.

In the case of large Enterprise databases, enterprises
which have /existed/ longer than Windows has, the access
is mostly through Windows only in that users submit
their queries via PC's and then access the resulting
reports as a text file via their PC's.

See Corey Murtaugh's response for another slant
on this.

NPL 

-- 
"It is impossible to make anything foolproof
because fools are so ingenious"
  - A. Bloch

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