Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005

A “Measure of Transaction Processing” 20 Years Later

Filed under: Data Warehousing and OLAP — Daniel Lemire @ 14:58

I just read an interesting short report by Jim Gray. The gist of the matter is that, since 2000, the rate of increase in computer performance per dollar has gone down. It is still exponential, but the rate of growth is much, much smaller. Gray blames memory latency.

As a side-note, how fast can you sort 16 GB of data on a typical PC? The answer is about 16 minutes.

3 Comments »

  1. Must depend how large your elements are.

    Comment by Seb — 8/8/2005 @ 19:15

  2. Seb: Right. That ought to be specified, but the paper doesn’t say. These are standard tests and there must be strict definitions somewhere, but I would assume that they mean sorting 32 bits blocks.

    Comment by Daniel Lemire — 8/8/2005 @ 19:19

  3. [...] missing at sea, What is infinite storage? , Science in an exponential world, That’s why I tinker, A “Measure of Transaction Processing” 20 Years Later, ACM Queue - A Conversation with Tim Bray, and so [...]

    Pingback by UC Berkeley holding tribute for Jim Gray — 16/11/2007 @ 8:50

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