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Rdb status and directions

Bill Gettys from Oracle just gave a status and directions talk on the Rdb database product. The engineering team is focusing on three things:

There are multiple new features coming in the next version, including 64 bit support for row caching, basically eliminating the 33 million row limitation. Additionally, continuous log miner will allow you to extract change records to load other databases (not just Rdb databases) in real time.

Bill mentioned that in a recent test, log miner extracted 1 million change records in 6 seconds, down from it's previous record of 30 seconds. This demonstrates some of the performance enhancements in the product.

Another notable change is the increase in the number of digits in the verstion number for the product. The engineering team have added a 5th digit to the version numbers to indictate optimization for EV56 processors or better. Estimated performance gains are in the 20 to 30 percent range just by using the version optimized for the processor.

The query optimizer has also been improved, particularly in the area of bit mapped indexes. The optimizer will now use all index information involved in a query, rather than just the index with the lowest cardinality. For the right query, this promises performance gains measured in an order of magnitude.

The future for Rdb certainly looks bright.

Futher information is available at the Oracle product page.