Oracle Corp has admitted there are very few takers for its VLM Very Large Memory configurations of Oracle 7.0 running on Digital Equipment Corp’s Digital Unix. Running a large chunk – up to 14Gb – of database in memory does not help process transactions any quicker – they are quick reads and writes to the database, says Oracle. The only kind of application that could benefit from VLM is complex queries in data warehousing, where you need to pile up large amounts of data in memory and check through it. Oracle concedes there has been a lot of fuss about VLM on DEC’s 64-bit Turbolaser systems, and not much revenue in the 18 months the combination has been on offer (CI No 2,647). This is because only a handful of companies need that kind of throughput, and, more importantly, few are prepared to pay the price for the special configuration. That said, the lack of trade in VLM configured systems is not stopping rival Informix Corp from moving its relational database OnLine Dynamic Server onto Silicon Graphics Inc hardware. Version 7.21 of Informix’s database can run in VLM on Silicon Graphics Challenge servers, running version 6.2 of the IRIX 6.2 operating system, a 64 bit implementation. The release follows hard on the availability of the Red Brick Warehouse from Red Brick Systems Inc for the same machine.
