Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Local vs. remote connection performance

It has been asked several times in several places; is there a performance difference between running a query locally in a client on the server and running the same query in a remote client?

The obvious answer given by the respondents including myself is: "if you do not return thousands of rows through the network, there must not be any difference". This type of response is opposed to what I believe; even if the answer seems obvious test it before you make any suggestions.

Tanel Poder got the same question and did what is needed to be done, he tested it and showed that there was a difference. In this great post of his.

His tests use a database on Solaris, sqlplus clients on Windows and Linux. I have tested the same using a database on Linux and the same behavior is observed there too.

Lesson learned again and again: test your suggestion even if the answer seems obvious.

Monday, February 04, 2008

Database version control

Coding horror is one of the software development blogs I keep a close eye on.

Jeff Atwood posted a nice piece about database version control recently. Database version control is maybe one of the most important and unfortunately most overlooked things in software development. The post is a good read including the links he provides.