{"id":3252,"date":"2011-01-10T23:44:17","date_gmt":"2011-01-11T03:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=3252"},"modified":"2011-01-10T23:44:17","modified_gmt":"2011-01-11T03:44:17","slug":"how-many-updates-per-second-can-a-standard-rdbms-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/10\/how-many-updates-per-second-can-a-standard-rdbms-process\/","title":{"rendered":"How many updates per second can a standard RDBMS process?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Folks: This weekend I&#8217;m teaching <a href=\"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/teaching\/rdbms-iap-2011\">a class at MIT on RDBMS programming<\/a>. Sadly I forgot to learn the material myself before offering to teach it. In giving students guidance as to when a standard RDBMS is likely to fall over and require investigation of parallel, clustered, distributed, or NoSQL approaches, I&#8217;d like to know roughly how many updates per second a standard RDBMS can process. Here are the criteria:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>mixture of inserts, updates, and selects, with the server doing 10 queries for every update and the typical update or insert involving two rows<\/li>\n<li>a 4U server with 8 CPU cores and enough RAM to hold the entire database<\/li>\n<li>eight hard drives so that transaction logs, indices, and tables can all reside on separate spindles (or magic RAID approaches can be used)<\/li>\n<li>perhaps a little bit of magic in the form of a solid-state drive being used for the transaction logs<\/li>\n<li>any RDBMS, including MySQL\/InnoDB, Oracle, Sql Server, DB2, etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m looking for a number that is good to within one order of magnitude.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks.<\/p>\n<p>[http:\/\/www.tpc.org\/tpce\/results\/tpce_perf_results.asp makes it look as though the answer is &#8220;about 2000&#8221; though I&#8217;m not sure if the TPC-E benchmark simultaneously requires some queries. It is tough to say because the tpc.org Web site is unusably slow&#8230;. I finally got the Word doc. It looks like they count some queries as &#8220;transactions&#8221;, e.g., &#8220;The [Customer-Position] transaction is a real-only transaction&#8221;. So maybe the answer is closer to 1000? The TPS-E benchmarks use some ridiculously expensive systems, but they also require a huge amount of data to be kept, e.g., 8 TB for a low-end system doing 2000 queries and updates\/second.]<\/p>\n<p>(The venerable TPC-C standard never struck me as matching up that well to typical Internet applications.)]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Folks: This weekend I&#8217;m teaching a class at MIT on RDBMS programming. Sadly I forgot to learn the material myself before offering to teach it. 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