Stephen:
Aha. Well, that makes sense. “Clustered” generally means “index stored with or within the row”, so it does stand to reason that an unsophisticated implementation would have to physically rewrite a bunch of stuff if you wrote things out of order. I imagine if I had an integer PK clustered (ascending) and wrote records {10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1} in that order, the last row written would take 9 read-writes to move everything down before it could write row 1 at the top.
So, I verified, none of the indexes are clustered. Plus we’re not writing.
So this is something different. We just now managed to provoke it into doing it again, but still don’t have enough information to be able to reproduce it. Fun!! (Not.)
Yeah, I think sybase made it the default on the idea that people would always have a write once mentality, where changes would have a reversing entry, or things would be only read. It is a nice concept, but I HATE that they made it the default. It gave me a lot of grief because the DBA insisted on doing ALL changes, and just wouldn’t listen. So that computer probably did over 2 months work for NOTHING. Luckily that was generally on the weekends, so it wan’t as bad as it could have been.
Outside of transactions, locks, and deadlocks, I think the database should be relatively fast, meaning that you wouldn’t notice a significant pause. And I am ASSUMING that that is what you mean. The page size at least WAS small, so it would do more page splits than say M/S SQL TODAY, or Oracle. So there might be more gaps where it seems to almost hesitate, but we are talking barely susceptible hesitations that may be tens or hundreds of milliseconds.
If you can, it might be a good idea to bring it up with sybase. It COULD be a jdbc problem, or even some oddity in sybase. If you are doing enough processing, it could even be garbage collection.
It could be a windows problem. Windows NEVER handled virtual memory well, and at least earlier versions of windows didn’t generally handle memory over a certain amount properly. They always wanted people to pay more to be able to do that. And what else is happening on that windows system?
