topic Re: MySQL or Commercial DB? in Alfresco Archive

MySQL or Commercial DB?

rstickle — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 04:47:35 GMT

Hi,We are currently trying Alfresco for a possible company wide Document Management solution. Does anyone have any experience with large deployments using MySQL? The question we are working on now is whether to use an Oracle DB or MySQL.Thanks.

Re: MySQL or Commercial DB?

pitt1 — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 22:23:07 GMT

We have been using Alfresco over Oracle for the past year. We have performance issues, and we only have a few thousand documents loaded (mostly PDF and HTML). Simple operations like keyword queries take several seconds when they ought to take milliseconds.

We're currently investigating the potential causes of these performance issues, and one possible culprit is that perhaps the Alfresco DB schema isn't tuned as well for Oracle as it is for MySQL. For example with Alfresco 1.3.X, there were oracle FK indexes that were completely missing, and we had to run a custom script to generate them. Also, MySQL is known to be faster for certain types of operations than Oracle due to the fact that it's more lightweight. We also suspect the RDBMS platform because we have done other things that would make the system performant, such as moving indexes onto a fast local drive, making sure caching is turned on, etc. Our colleagues in another group have been using Alfresco as long as we have, but they've deployed it on top of MySQL on lesser hardware, loaded tens of thousands of documents, and get lightening fast performance.

FWIW, that's been my experience, and I'm currently trying to get Alfresco up and running with MySQL to see if it makes a difference. There could be other factors involved that I'm not aware of, and it would be nice to hear from one of the alfresco engineers as to the level of performance tuning for Oracle vs. MySQL…

Re: MySQL or Commercial DB?

rstickle — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 04:19:00 GMT

Thanks for the valuable feedback.

Re: MySQL or Commercial DB?

kevinr — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:09:52 GMT

Earlier versions of Alfresco undeniably ran better on MySQL - it is more optimized for it. In 2.1 we made a run through of all the common DBs - including Oracle - to make sure that indexes are added were required. Hopefully you should find 2.1 works just a nicely on Oracle as on MySQL - if not please let us know! Generally Alfresco is much heavier on the CPU than the DB - adding a faster CPU/more cores will generally give you a lot better performance increase than changing the DB.

Thanks,

Kevin

Re: MySQL or Commercial DB?

nicolasb — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 17:25:11 GMT

Hi,

Earlier versions of Alfresco undeniably ran better on MySQL - it is more optimized for it. In 2.1 we made a run through of all the common DBs - including Oracle - to make sure that indexes are added were required

I just read 2.1 should run on Oracle as fine as MySql. We are running on 2.0.1 (with oracle rdbms) and we are planing on upgrading it to 2.1.

Unfortunaly I can't find mention about such database optimization in release 2.1 http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Release_2.1#Other_Enhancements_since_Release_2.0

What kind of optimizations are done ?

Thanks

Nicolas B.

Re: MySQL or Commercial DB?

kevinr — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 10:19:36 GMT

Confirmation and testing of indexes in the appropriate places.

Thanks,

Kevin

Re: MySQL or Commercial DB?

todd_acl — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:16:43 GMT

How about native XML databases?