SAS Oracle DIGITAL UNIX AlphaServer 4100 DIGITAL

This document provides an overview and detailed technical information about the DIGITAL HiTest Suite for SAS Oracle on DIGITAL UNIX AlphaServer 4100 systems. It serves as a guide for configuring prequalified computer systems, detailing hardware and software components, installation, tuning parameters, and interoperability test results.

The HiTest Suite is designed for Data Warehousing solutions, supporting databases ranging from 24 GB to 140 GB. Key software components include SAS System Release 6.12, Oracle7 Database Version 7.3.3 (with Parallel Query Option, PL/SQL, SQLPlus, SQLNet), and DIGITAL UNIX Operating System Version 4.0B. Hardware configurations cover both external StorageWorks cabinets with RAID controllers and internal UltraSCSI RAID options.

System installation and setup involve specific considerations for disk storage (RAID 5 stripesets, optimal chunk size calculation, enabling write-back cache for performance), operating system configuration (using Deferred Swap Mode, tuning UNIX kernel parameters like vm-maxvas and shm-max), and application settings for Oracle7's 64-bit option parameters and user process limits.

Interoperability testing was conducted using a Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) database, with sizes from 164 million to over 928 million rows. The database was built on raw devices to maximize I/O throughput, with tablespaces (FACTS, FACTSINDEX, TEMP, DIMENSION, DIMINDEX) distributed across separate disks to minimize I/O contention. Data loading using SQL Loader demonstrated that parallel loading significantly reduced overall load times. Oracle database queries (five SQL join scripts) were run sequentially and in parallel on both minimum and maximum configurations, with results showing performance under cold and warm cache conditions. SAS system database tests included forecasting and statistical modeling functions.

The document also addresses problems encountered during testing, such as limitations with "Limit Address Space Unlimited" in C-Shell (with a workaround of setting explicit large limits), Oracle account access issues related to group IDs (resolved by restoring or reinstituting IDs), and an undocumented 128KB multi-block read count limitation for Oracle with 32K data blocks (resolved by setting db_file_multiblock_read_count to 4).