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Bogdan_Ch
Asked: 2009-06-26 08:36:58 +0800 CST

What issues a DBA can face if he will manage CACHE database in production environment?

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I mean CACHE from InterSystems (http://www.intersystems.com/cache/)

Does this database stable enough ? Does the vendor provide prompt support for issues and bugs ? Will the database files grow faster (comparing with the same amount of data in traditional RDBMS) ?

I would like to read an opinion of a DBA who have ever managed a CACHE database and also had in the past an experience with an enterprise version of any traditional RDBMS (like MS SQL, Oracle, DB2). Were your daily DBA tasks very different and what was your biggest challenge with that ?

I will also appreciate if one can share an opinion of how CACHE from InterSystems can be compared with other object-oriented database management systems (OODBMS)

cache

2 Answers

  1. I strongly recommend not to put your step ahead for Intersystem's product. For following reasons.

    1. They do not have strong support basis compared to MS and Oracle.
    2. The Database has lot of issues once you try using it through ODBC drivers. specifically if you are trying to play with a volume in millions of records.
    3. The oprations of this database is beyond the understanding of normal DBA's who worked on relational databases.
    4. The database is not fully ANSI SQL compatible.
    5. The company claims itself to be worlds fatest database but it is 100% false statement.
    6. You can not use any professional ETL tools against this database due to poor ODBC compatibility.
    7. No strong support from the Intersyatems.
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  2. The person who wrote the 7-point "don't do it" response obviously doesn't get it. Yeah, it's not MS-SQL. It's not meant to be. It is, however, completely stable and doesn't require a multitude of patches to stay that way. I've been supporting it for 10 years - it doesn't crash. In that time, I once had a hardware failure during an upgrade in the middle of the night, and my backup tape failed. Intersystems had me up and running with no data loss or corruption in less than one hour - at 3 in the morning!! This product is rock solid. And yes, I have supported both MS-SQL and Oracle for the same amount of time. Just as you wouldn't use a hammer to fix everything, you use different tools for different jobs.

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