Re: I am in a Holy War about webserving from a System i

Walden H. Leverich wrote:

Now who's telling lies. Hey, I'm all in favor of having the System i do
the web serving, but your statement is wrong on two levels.
First, if you left the data on the System i and only use the PC for the
web front end then the data access would still be on the System i, so
the performance would remain the same. And second, any decent PC server
would have no problem querying a million row table, or a 10M, or 100M
table. Can a PC app be written to perform slowly, sure, but so can a
System i one. A correctly indexed SQLServer will have no problem with
multi-million row tables.

I'm staying out of this because it's an apples-to-airports comparison and so it's an opinion, and I've been pretty good about staying away from opinion pieces in the lists.

But whenever my good buddy Walden drops a couple statements like this, I feel the need to respond <grin>. First and foremost, he's absolutely correct on the part about a properly multi-tiered architecture. With ODBC/JDBC you don't need to replicate data (although you might want to stage data for other reasons, but that's a different issue). But the point is that, issues of security and bad design aside, a properly written multi-tiered application will scale right along with your System i. The web app server is simply a reformatting front end. (That's why, properly done, the thing can run on the System i just as well - a good thin web application can fly if you give it 500MB or so of dedicated memory, but that's a different issue.)

However, I have to take exception to the statement that "any decent PC server" can handle a "100M table". That really, really depends on your definition of decent server, and as I remember the original post, it was something about throwing the web on "an old PC". Yeah, you can make SQL Server fly, but it takes more than an old PC. It takes typically thousands of dollars worth of hardware and software - include Windows Server and SQL Server, RAID and tape backup, and your cost is comparable to a System i. I'm pretty sure that's NOT the system Booth was talking about.

Joe