What is the difference?

[autoent]

My company has been complaining about Progress database running slow. The vendor we bought the software from recommended upgrading the server drives to (2) 15K SCSI in a RAID 1 & upgrade all the workstations with more RAM. So we did that and still it is slow querying the database. Now the vendor tells us that we need to purchase the "Enterprise" edition vs. the "Wkgp RDBMS" we currently have. They promise this will absolutely increase speed. I am cautious to spend that kind of money and it seems like the are just throwing parts at it to see if it works? Any suggestions?

 

[TomBascom]

An Enterprise database license enables two significant features that impact performance:

1) -spin. This is the mechanism that is used to take maximum advantage of multiple CPUs (or cores). WG uses a much slower semaphore to control concurrency (as of 10.1B the semaphore is replaced by -spin 1; but -spin 1 is still a whole lot slower than "real" -spin values).

2) Page writers. These are auxiliary processes that write updates to disk on behalf of users. They make it so that the user doesn't have to wait for an IO to complete before they can continue (writes only, they will still have to wait for reads).

3) Enterprise also lifts the # of users limit. That doesn't really have an impact on performance but a lot of people choose WG over ENT based on number of users rather than the need for performance and that can be a big mistake. The people making that choice are often the sales people -- a cynic might say that they're trying to minimize costs that they don't get a commission on without really thinking about the long term impact on their customer

Properly implemented both features 1 & 2 can make a big difference. An Enterprise license isn't a silver bullet -- but it can be very effective when properly aimed.

 

[tamhas]

Before plunking down the big bucks, you might want to either hire a performance consultant to take a look or at least go through the process with the forum of reviewing your parameter settings and configuration. One would normally expect a competent vendor to have helped you do this, but your description so far doesn't indicate that it has happened.