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Comment by brixon | Hacker News Reader

The new SPARCs have something like that too. http://www.mythics.com/about/blog/an-introduction-to-your-se...

> Other silicon accelerators include a SQL coprocessor in each core. Entire SELECT statements now run at silicon speeds.

seriously? love to see how/why that was put in the die

Oracle did this in the past 2 generations of their UltraSPARC architecture.

At it's core a `SELECT FROM` statement is a filter lambda (without any joins, or before/after a join has been done depending on query optimization).

Fundamentally this is because an SQL table is a flat array. With row's being flat array's within the table's memory space.

Calculating the pointer to fields within rows within a table is ridiculously parallel. You're limited only by SIMD size. (this is 1 FMA + 1 add against a constant ~2 ticks).

Also custom wide SIMD registers can allow for `VARCHAR(255)` equality statements to be done in 1 processor cycle.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that when a database company swallows a CPU hardware division that the CPU might sprout some more database specific operations, but I was.

I would love to see some benchmarks of how much this speeds up some sample workload queries, if you happen to know of some (preferably not from Oracle's marketing dept.)?

Oracle UltraSPARC purchasing agreement forbids 3rd party direct comparison benchmarks.

The only ones you'll find by 3rd party are non-direct comparisons like transactions per second in Oracle-SQL. Or Core Count.

Why am I not surprised by this. I sometimes find myself thinking I should check my bias against Oracle, just to make sure I'm not being too hard on them for past transgressions (for example, Microsoft is far from perfect but they've come a long ways from many of their more negative past practices). Then I learn something like this, which while it doesn't directly mean they are still continuing in predatory marketing and sales practices, doesn't exactly assuage any fears I might have have had.

I currently work for a company that heavily uses Oracle technology. It's horrible. Our culmative contracts are worth several hundred thousand dollars per years.

But they'll still cheat us on small things. We request information on a training seminar (we had a free attendance voucher), and they lose our account information until 1 week after the seminar ended.

It's to the point where I just laugh. Everyone knows their cheating us, but upper management won't change.

Oracle's database is pretty good (if you can afford it). All their other software, from what I've seen, is shockingly bad considering their resources.

Yes if you shell out for all the money to run it on every core, and use a lot memory it is solid. But the bang for your buck, Microsoft SQL has a better support plan, and saner licensing model. My experience is working with smaller datasets <200GB so YMMV.

I mean I'd rather use Postgres. But large corps like having a vendor to call.

Check out EnterpriseDB. I don't know how good they are in practice. But their speciality is solving the exact problem you mentioned with Oracle vs Postgres.

http://www.enterprisedb.com/products-services-training/produ...

Forbidding benchmarks is the kind of thing that should draw the wrath of any state worth the name.

Alas.

Or if someone steals one ?

Err...you know who bought Sun right?

That's interesting. For some reason, I was under the impression Oracle had basically killed off the hardware development portion of Sun. I don't recall where I got that idea though.

Good to see new developments in this line. The more (open) hardware platforms the better, IMO.

> I don't recall where I got that idea though.

They killed the desktops. That, essentially, made SPARC mostly invisible to most people. They also do a crappy job of reminding the world that a software company (as they position themselves) can make decent hardware.

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