Before reporting how I've been getting on with VectorWise I need to set
out my objectives. Because of limited resources there was never any way
I was going to test the utmost range of what VectorWise can do limited
only by the laws of physics. I daresay that soon someone somewhere will
assemble the necessary state-of-the-art hardware and it will glow a dull
red while it shatters the relevant TPC benchmarks. Unfortunately I have
to make do with some very ordinary hardware.

Very ordinary. My VectorWise box is a mid-range desktop machine of a
certain age. It is running 64-bit CentOS 5.4 on an AMD Athlon Dual Core
3600+ 1.90GHz chip. It has 8Gb of 800Mhz RAM which is the most the mobo
can cope with, and I'm using two of its SATA2 JBOD disks:

/dev/sdd: SATA_WDC_WD360GD-50GWD-WMAH91588912
Timing buffered disk reads: 150 MB in 3.04 seconds = 49.40MB/sec
Benchmarking /dev/sdd [35304MB], wait 30 seconds...
Results: 117 seeks/second, 8.48 ms random access time

/dev/sde: SATA_Hitachi_HDS7220_JK1100YAGRTW2T
Timing buffered disk reads: 370 MB in 3.01 seconds = 122.92MB/sec
Benchmarking /dev/sde [1907729MB], wait 30 seconds...
Results: 75 seeks/second, 13.21 ms random access time

The Western Digital disk has the Ingres/VectorWise installation, log
file, etc., and the 2Tb Hitachi disk has the data locations.

Notice that I'm running CentOS. Officially VectorWise is supported only
on Red Hat so far. It is claimed that VectorWise will run—and run
well—on 32-bit harware too, and I might get around to checking that
soon, but 64-bit is recommended. (One reason for recommending 64-bit
hardware is that VectorWise can use a lot of memory. In fact the
alpha-release that I am using does not handle memory shortages very
gracefully. I am told that is currently being fixed.)

So given that I can use only the sort of system that can be assembled
from the junk lying around in most large offices, I have focused most of
my attention on usability and how VectorWise operations have to be
planned. Does it work? What works? What can I expect might give trouble?
How can I refresh the database? What sort of down-time will I require,
and for what? How easy is it to interface? How standard is the SQL? What
can I use it for even running on low-end hardware?

That is not to say that I have totally neglected performance.
Performance is the reason to install VectorWise. One of the early
lessons is that any user on any hardware will get a lot of benefit from
the speed of VectorWise.

--
Roy

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