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Re:Oracle's Declaration to Sun Customers ... and IBM by tsuraan on Thursday September 10, 2009 @11:22AM (#815407)
When I was interviewing with the DB2 team for IBM, they mentioned that the high-end IBM database servers implement special instructions (CPU-level) for accelerating certain DB operations. I don't know any more details than that, but I'd guess that's where Oracle is going to go with SPARC.
Re:Oracle's Declaration to Sun Customers ... and IBM by ajross on Thursday September 10, 2009 @10:34PM (#816692)
I'm not aware of any DB2-specific instructions, but POWER6 and above implement a decimal floating point instruction set, allowing things like regulatoriliy-mandated financial computations to be hardware accelerated instead of computed in software. That's clearly a nod to the same market that is buying DB2.
Re:Oracle's Declaration to Sun Customers ... and IBM by derwiki on Thursday September 10, 2009 @01:13PM (#815662)
That might be as simple as having super-low level operations that they hand write in assembly for each supported CPU, and all other layers staying the same.