The folks at the IBM AS/400 Teraplex Integration Center here in Rochester, MN took delivery of their new Condor 840 24-way server in July and as they had done in previous years, when the Apache and Northstar 12-ways were introduced, invited Coglin Mill to be the first partner in to test out the new hardware. Of course we jumped at the chance to play with their latest "toy". This "box" was loaded with 96GB main storage and 2.3 Terabytes of DASD.
We initially performed the same benchmark tests that we had previously run on the older hardware models. This gave us a baseline result that proved what we already knew - that these new servers, with their copper chips, SOI technology and high speed bus really fly. The results were impressive. However, the RODIN software used for these benchmarks was getting a little "old". We've since released 2 new versions, each of which has enhancements to functionality and performance, so it was time to update the benchmark to use the latest release of RODIN - V3R2.
Using the new version we replicated the original benchmark scenario using "out of the box" configuration. Nothing was tweaked or manipulated to boost the results (surely no one does that in their benchmarks, do they !!!). The benchmark demonstrates the loading of a single detail data set, using an 8-way source table join, with various cleansing rules and transformations. The table below shows the awesome throughput we achieved. The figure of 173 million rows per hour is, we believe, unparalleled (there's a pun in there) by any other ETL tool on any platform.
For a comparison, we've also included the results achieved without utilizing RODIN's unique parallel loading technology. This gives you an idea of the less impressive results you might achieve via a non-parallel tool, including SQL, SQL based tools or your own hand crafted code.
Even though the AS/400 has extensive in-built parallel technology, most tools cannot take full advantage of it when processing complex joins, transformations and table inserts and updates. RODIN has the capability of exploiting both the in-built parallel technology as well as its own unique parallel loading technology thus achieving processing rates far in advance of any other tool.
As with previous forays into the Teraplex Center we came away with a few new ideas on how we can make RODIN even faster still and these ideas will become reality in a future release.
See IBMs story on the recent results at the teraplex.
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