Dear BOINC

Quote from the Homepage

"July 13, 2004
Sorry folks, we ran into a cascade failure, our database server hung ..."

Databases don't just hung! What database system is BOINC using? Is it Sybase, Oracle, DB2?

There are lots of DBAs out here that can help. Can you provide more details?

Hydnum Repandum </br>
Open SETI Initiative

They are using MySQL.

> Dear BOINC
>
> Quote from the Homepage
>
> "July 13, 2004
> Sorry folks, we ran into a cascade failure, our database server hung ..."
>
> Databases don't just hung! What database system is BOINC using? Is it
> Sybase, Oracle, DB2?
>
> There are lots of DBAs out here that can help. Can you provide more details?
>
> Hydnum Repandum </br>
> Open SETI Initiative
>

is this the error ?
SETI@home - 2004-07-14 16:19:41 - Giving up on download of 12ja04ab.2788.1120.115896.254: file was not found on server

SETI@home - 2004-07-14 16:19:41 - Unrecoverable error for result 12ja04ab.2788.1120.115896.254_1 (file transfer error: couldn't get input files:
12ja04ab.2788.1120.115896.254: file was not found on server
)

Ich höre immer gerne zu,wenn ich auch nicht immer belehrt werden möchte ;-)

BOINC is a serious system requiring a high perfomance real DBMS. Oracle and IBM are already sponsoring . . . Surely they will be more than glad to provide free licenses. It is ridiculous having to wait hours to check tables and indexes after a simple database failure and restart.
Hydnum Repandum </br>
Open SETI Initiative

> What MySQL? You can not use a pseudo/Mickey mouse DBMS for a serious system
> like BOINC! Oracle and IBM are already sponsoring . . . Surely they will be
> more than glad to provide free licenses. It is ridiculous having to wait
> hours to check tables and indexes after a simple database failure and restart.
> Hydnum Repandum </br>[b]
> >

They should get better sponsors. It's surely not normal.What in the world to they have setup over there? I can't believe they cannot have something better than that ! After all , with so many participants it's great sponsorship...

I'm probably gonna get flamed for this but from experience, the different programs etc. you set up are only as good as the people setting it up :o/

> They should get better sponsors. It's surely not normal.What in the world to
> they have setup over there? I can't believe they cannot have something better
> than that ! After all , with so many participants it's great sponsorship...
>
>

One of the project goals is for a BOINC project administrator to be able to setup a new BOINC project with freely available software.

While the backend for SAH v1 uses informix, we cannot use it at this time as we need to prove that MySQL can handle the load of BOINC's largest project.

Once we have determined what the configuration should be for high load projects we'll be able to re-evaluate our current DB implementation.

----- Rom
BOINC Development Team, U.C. Berkeley

> What MySQL? You can not use a pseudo/Mickey mouse DBMS for a serious system
> like BOINC! Oracle and IBM are already sponsoring . . . Surely they will be
> more than glad to provide free licenses. It is ridiculous having to wait
> hours to check tables and indexes after a simple database failure and restart.
> Hydnum Repandum </br>


After long years as an Oracle bigot, I will still tell you that no mater what database engine you use, when the database engine crashes, it takes time to restart. The more data you have, the longer it takes.

Databases are complex beasties and all are subject to problems ... And they all take time to recover fram an error, regarless of the source of the error.

Even though IBM/Oracle are sonsors of SETI@Home, they are not necessarily sponsors to all of the projects that would use BOINC. To accomplish that goal they have to select tools that are readily available to all. I grant you that I would love to have seen Oracle used for SETI/BOINC, but, regardless of the database engine, portability is hard to achieve with any database because no database truly has an implementation that would not prevent porting to another database engine.

Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and all the rest have "quirks" that do not even use common Data Description Language (DDL) that defines the basic structure of the tables used in BOINC. Writing proper queries using SQL is very difficult if you try to work across several platforms, worse yet, the implementation of the database engine makes a fast operating query for Oracle slow and vice / versa; simply because they were developed by different companies and the processing is different.

Just my opinion ...