Fastest Informix DBA Contest V – April 2012

Published on June 19, 2012 by Lester Knutsen

1,000 OLTP users benchmark running on an Apple Mac Mini Server

Andrew Ford is the Grand Prize Winner of a new iPad

Advanced DataTools is pleased to announce the results of our latest Fastest Informix DBA Contest that was held at the 2012 IIUG Informix Conference, April 22-25, 2012 in San Diego, California.

Congratulations to Andrew Ford, the Grand Prize Winner of the new Apple iPad and the Fastest Overall Informix DBA. Andrew’s results were almost three times faster than the next closest contestant’s results. This year the contest was run on an Apple Mac Mini Server, using Informix Enterprise 11.70.FC4. The server is very small and inexpensive, 1.4 inches by 7.7 inches square. The CPU is an Intel Core i7 with 4 cores, and includes 8 GB of RAM, and it has two disk drives, one for the application and one for the database. It is amazing to see 1,000 user sessions running on this little box and to achieve the level of throughput that Andrew accomplished.

The goal of the contest was to see who could optimize an Informix database server running 1,000 OLTP users in under one hour and generate the most transactions per minute. Andrew generated over 57,000 transactions per minute. We used the Open Source BenchmarkSQL Java program to generate the transactions for this contest. The BenchmarkSQL is a JDBC benchmark that closely resembles the TPC-C standard for OLTP. It is a Java program that generates 1,000 sessions doing inserts, updates, and deletes against the Informix database server.