I timported the "MASTER" table from http://registry.faa.gov/database/AR122001.zip on my sun box and it took about 15 minutes to load using "timport -csv". Its got about 320,000 rows so it loaded at about 350 recs/sec.
Don't think so. I just compared two different steps, the timport to /dev/null with no DB ops, and a create table as select * on the existing DB. Both took twice as much user time on sparc than Linux. (700 MHz PIII vs 300 MHz UltraSparc-II). The timport takes twice as long as the table copy.
In playing with the db I've noticed that SELECTs operate at a pretty good rate. Maybe sparcs just suck at write. Since sun is a big market share for Texis maybe some investigation is warranted.
We'll certainly investigate some more, although that's why I tried the timport without writing to the DB, and looked at user CPU time. It's almost as if the Sparc and Pentium get the same work done per clock cycle, and the Pentium cycles that much faster, although that's difficult to believe, so maybe there's some missing or different optimizations needed for the Sparc chip.
