Jignesh Shah's Weblog: ISV Engineering: OpenSource Databases in the New Sun Microsystems

Recently I got access to the refreshed Sun Fire X4140 consisting of 2 x 6-core Opterons with 36GB RAM. Since the release of the final PostgreSQL 8.4 bits I had not tried it out so I downloaded the Solaris 10 binaries of PostgreSQL 8.4 (64-bits) from the download site of postgresql.org and took it for the test drive with the same iGen benchmarks that I had used earlier for my PGCon2009 presentation.

The system already had Solaris 10 5/09 installed with couple of  SSDs  and a RAID LUN for the database. I put the WAL log on an internal drive with ZFS intent log on SSDs and the tablespaces on the RAID LUN (on an external storage array).

Notice the crossing of the 400K tpm boundary with PostgreSQL here using this benchmark toolkit. None of my tests have ever done that before. I consider this to be a milestone achievement with PostgreSQL, Solaris 10, Sun Fire Systems with Opterons.

On Jan 9,2006 Sun published SpecJAppServer2004 benchmark with WebLogic/DB2/Solaris 10 using Sun Fire T2000 servers using UltraSPARC T1 processors and Sun StorEdge 3320 storage array. The result is 801.70 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard .

This was the first public benchmark ever to use DB2 V8.2 on Sun Fire T2000. The published benchmark runs DB2 on Sun Fire T2000 with 6-cores 1Ghz UltraSPARC T1 . The DB2 license that would be required for the config is 6 x 30PVU= 180 PVUs (or using the old terminology about 1.8 CPU Licenses). This proves that the combination of DB2 on Sun Fire T2000 is an attractive platform considering various metrics like database License Prices, Power Ratings, Volume used by the server, etc.

Disclosure Statement:
SPECjAppServer2004 Sun Fire T2000 (8 cores, 1 chip) 801.70 JOPS@Standard.
SPEC, SPECjAppServer reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. All results from www.spec.org as of 01/15/07.