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August 29, 2006 | Comments: (0)

The Viper Mistake

TAGS: DB2

OK, as I'm sure every one of you read my review of DB2 Viper and hung on my every word, so it's only fitting that I clear up a mistake I made in my numbers.

The problem is I got it right in the preview, but somehow flubbed the numbers for the formal review.

It should have read that Viper's XML engine has been measured up to 7x faster than Microsot and Oracle, not 7%. So that was my bad, but it still doesn't change my original assessment. I still think that it would take a pretty decent XML load on the server for you to really feel the difference. Think about a single insert statement. You type it in and hit run and it returns instantly with 1 row... right? Now imagine that happening 7x faster. That doesn't really even mean anything to us. So there are 2 scenarios where I can see this really coming into play... the first is where we just described... in single inserts done by the thousands. In this case, you'll probably feel the difference in speed pretty significantly. The other scenario is in very large inserts. If you're inserting an XML file that's really big, and it's the bulk of the load, then you'll probably feel this speed increase as well. However, if the XML file is just a small part of an otherwise large insert, then it probably still won't make that much difference because it's not the bottleneck to begin with. So say you were inserting a 2GB blob with it then you probably won't be impressed with the speed as much as if you were inserting it by itself.

So I still say that the large portion of the market won't see mass returns from this. It does bring up another really good point though. I'm still really wondering what they've got in store for the future. The new engine will preserve the digital signatures of XML stored in the DB. And right now I don't think there are enough people passing around digitally signed XML files to really get a lot of use out of this new engine. What it does make me wonder though is whether they'll be able to do this with other types of docs in the future. Will we be seeing native Word formats, or Excel, or PDF? These are file types that people sign all the time and the native storage of the XML engine would be an excellent use in these areas.
Just imagine... a native Excel data type in your tables. Or like I said... a native PDF format.

Posted by Sean McCown on August 29, 2006 07:44 AM

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