Sun Starfire scores on Red-brick suite

Palot Alto 09 Aug 99 The Sun Enterprise 10000 Starfire server achieved a new record on the Informix Proof of Performance and Scalability (POPS) test. The test is designed to to measure the performance and scalability of Informix Red Brick Warehouse in a true retail environment. As further proof of the global reach in the retail market, this test was conducted at Sun's Asia Pacific Benchmark Centre in Toyko, Japan.

Beating all previous results the Red Brick Warehouse on the Sun platform successfully loaded, queried and scaled a data warehouse to more than 300GB of raw data with up to 600 concurrent users. These results were achieved using only half of the CPU capacity of the Starfire, clearly allowing users more expansion capability (headroom) and performance with additional CPU's. Table loading at 14 GB/hour was 2.3 times faster than prior test results showing that Sun's fibre channel FCAL storage enables faster load throughput. The results demonstrate the system's outstanding performance for large-scale data warehousing in the intense retail environment.

The test was constructed to simulate a retail environment that includes 63 supermarket stores, more than 19,000 products, roughly 3.6 million transactions per day and 35 ongoing sales promotions. The data warehouse included two fact tables (daily forecasts and daily sales) and five dimension tables (customer, period, product, promotion and store). Loading data into a data warehouse is one of the most critical success factors for any data warehouse. Loading consists of data cleansing, index building, referential integrity checking and aggregation updating.

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