SPARC T5-8 Server Delivers World Record OLAP Query Performance

BENCHMARK SUMMARY

(As of Tuesday, 26 March 2013)

Oracle's SPARC T5-8 server delivered world record query performance, together with a near real-time analytic capability, using the Oracle OLAP Perf Version 3 workload running Oracle Database 11g Release 2 on Oracle Solaris 11. The SPARC T5-8 server was able to provide greater query per hour performance throughput while supporting more concurrent OLAP users compared to an eight-chip server running an Intel Xeon E7-8870 and a SPARC T4-4 server.

BENCHMARK DESCRIPTION

The Oracle OLAP Perf Version 3 benchmark is a workload designed to demonstrate and stress the Oracle OLAP product's core capabilities of fast query, near real-time updates and rich calculations using a multi-dimensional model to support enhanced Data Warehousing.

The bulk of the benchmark entails running a number of concurrent users, each issuing typical multidimensional queries against an Oracle OLAP cube. In this version, version 3, of the OLAP benchmark, the cube size was a 4 billion row cube. The cube has four dimensions: time, product, customer, and channel. Each query user issues approximately 150 different queries.

The point of the demonstration is to show that an Oracle OLAP system can be designed which results in data being no more than a few minutes out of date. This is what is meant by near real-time analytics.

BENCHMARK OUTCOME

The SPARC T5-8 server with Oracle Database is capable of supporting 600 concurrent OLAP query users (with zero think time) which process 2.93 million analytic and aggregate queries per hour with an average response time of 0.66 seconds.

This performance was enabled by keeping the entire cube in-memory utilizing the 4TB of memory on the SPARC T5-8 server.

The SPARC T5-8 server outperformed the eight-chip Intel Xeon E7-8870 server configured with 512GB of memory by a factor of 1.6 with respect to the query throughput.

The SPARC T5-8 server was also 4.3 times faster than the SPARC T4-4 server for query throughput.

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