Digital Equipment Corp has finally found a use for its 64-bit computing environment, a premature architecture we once said was built in response to a dog whistle that only DEC could hear. Last week, thanks to Oracle Corp, it was able to claim phenomenal improvement in handling large databases by coupling the raw speed of its 300MHz 21164 Alpha with huge amounts of main memory to a new 64-bit Oracle Corp technology called Very Large Memory. Oracle7 and Rdb varieties of Very Large Memory exploit DEC’s 64-bit Alpha and Unix enabling them to address large amounts of main memory, map huge chunks of a database directly into RAM, and perform input-output operations in 32Kb chunks, rather than 2Kb packets. DEC’s new 8400 5/300 and 8200 5/300 AlphaServers, the Turbo Lasers, have from one to 12, and one to six, central processor units, and up to 14Gb and 6Gb RAM respectively. Running Very Large Memory on them, users can expect performance increases three to 20 times greater than the same applications running under 32-bit Oracle environments on the same system, according to Oracle president and chief executive Larry Ellison. The combination will drive tasks where SQL statements repeatedly use all of the data in a database block – such as decision support, or very large row multimedia applications and geographical information systems – at warp speed. It will be less useful in applications such as transaction processing in which many concurrent transactions access small pieces of data. DEC and Oracle plan to extend Very Large Memory on AlphaServers with support for diskless sorting and new tuning and prediction tools.
