database vs filesystem performance

[Francois Ouellette]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Marc Lijour" <marc-bbkyySd1vPWsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>
To: <tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 07, 2005 7:50 PM
Subject: [TLUG]: database vs filesystem performance
> Does somebody know the compared performance of the filesystem against a
RDBMS?
>
> Thanks

Bonjour Marc,

Not an easy thing to compare, a RDBMS is immensely more complex than a
filesystem, which it uses somehow as the physical repository of the data.
Some products use raw files and bypass the O/S filesystem, some other use
plain files which contain the indexing information and/or the data itself,
usually organized in "pages" which are large records containing one or more
tuples of a table. Most RDBMS use large caches of data to try to reduce the
amount of I/O operations to/from the physical files. Plus, with a RDBMS we
have the transactional aspect of processing the data, which adds another
area of processing and disk operations everytime we want to update some
data.

My experienced with very large applications is that reading and processing
lots of data (i.e. hundreds of thousands of records) was thousands of times
faster with flat files compared to a RDBMS. But it is not really practical
to try to compare the functionality of a RDBMS system with simple file
operations.

  François Ouellette
<fouellet-cpI+UMyWUv9BDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>

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