I realize my opinion may be unpopular in this forum, however, I have to say
that if it's mission critical, I would want an IBM AS/400. As a
consultant, I work with numerous hospital and health care companies that
each manage tens of gigs of data on their machines. There is very little
unscheduled downtime, and the machines have a great track record. All
sorts of configurations are available, from small machines to quite large
multi CPU boxes, much larger than my perception of intel boxes. All manner
of redundancy is available, directly from IBM with quite complete
support: Unprotected disk, Mirrored disk, as well as numerous hardware
RAID arrays with and without hot swap capabilities.
The backup facilities match the capabilities of the disks - large automated
tape arrays are available for completing unattended backups, and the
operating system has built in save-while-active technology. In other
words, a complete snapshot of the system can be taken while the users are
using the database, and it does not interrupt their work.
The AS/400 is a made for business machine which excels at data storage and
retrieval. The primary programming language on the box is RPG, which is
extremely effective at building database applications of the kind you would
also consider building with MySQL. I've never found an environment that
matches it in terms of being able to build an application system quickly.
On top of all that, IBM has made a commitment to make the box more open
system accessible. There is a full TCP stack, so the internet is
completely accessible. Java is now available on the machine, along with
some extensions for accessing the database and other internal machine
facilities. Also available are a C compiler, and full access to the
standard C library from any integrated language environment. Further, the
machine can act as a web server either through the IBM http server, or the
Apache web server.
The machine is also designed for high security implementations. There is a
definite layer between the internal system and the user program level that
is difficult to penetrate. Every program and file can be secured in
numerous ways, up to an including a list of only authorized user id's that
are allowed to use it.
If that doesn't convince you, be aware that you may also install an intel
based linux server (called an X-series by ibm) into an AS/400, and share
some of the AS/400 advanced hardware, such as disk and RAM with the linux
hardware.
As far as your question regarding the sharing of data, you may move data
off the machine through a socket client program. You could write a program
on the 400 to collect records, put them in a buffer, and transmit them to a
socket server on your linux machine. The socket server on the linux
machine could be a perl program as I understand it, although you may want
it to be a bit faster by writing it in C. I was hoping for an AS/400 mysql
client, but no such port has been done -- I've got the code here, but it
looks like such a big job, I'm not sure I'm up to the task.
Regards,
Rich
At 04:37 AM 9/11/01, Toni Mueller wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I need some facts on how MySQL compares to an AS/400 with their
>integrated data base engine. I'm talking to an AS/400 user who
>claims that there is no software in the market that can hold up
>against the AS/4000 in terms of speed and reliability. One
>claim is that it didn't fail him once in 15 years, and speed
>is also very impressive. On his regular used system, one of the
>smalles AS/400 you can get, serving some 1-3 GB of data (he
>didn't know exactly how much, but 1GB is the absolute minimum
>we estimated from one table), he ran complex reports that
>involved from several hundred thousand records to a million
>records in some 1-5 seconds wall clock time. Hard to beat that,
>I say, but first we need to get the chance ;) We would
>need to serve the same data from a PC server running Linux,
>but with a web frontend instead of a tty front end. He doesn't
>trust MySQL to be sufficiently reliable and fast, and I
>have no facts to match his claims. The task would be to
>process all kinds of sales figures, orders, and some
>manufacturing data, too, for MIS reports and possibly data
>entry frontends to the legacy systems. So his question is
>how high is his risk to loose by investing into development
>for a prior-known unsuitable "solution", while we think it's
>feasible to go with MySQL but lack the hard facts to back
>this up. www.mysql.com gives too little evidence of what
>is actually needed.
>
>A related issue would be how to connect the two data base
>engines together, so that importing or re-exporting the
>data from/to the AS/400 goes smooth. Perl would be the
>language of choice here ;)
>
>
>Regards,
>--Toni++
>
>
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Regards,
Rich
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