Hi!

    I have questions about capacity a speed SQL server (Interbase, MS SQL,
Oracle).
1. How many records can be in one table?
2. How fast will select SQL with 1 000 000 000 records in a table?

       Thanks in advance.

--
Vaclav Kolar
mailto:vaclavko...@melzer.cz
http://www.melzer.cz

Billion-record tables will tax the limits of any system but I'm sure
that Oracle and DB/2 can handle it.

Oddly enough, the number of seeks required to locate a record, even
among a billion, in a B-tree index is not that large.  It works on
powers of "n."  So as an extremely simple example if there were ten
entries per page that can be thought of as "a page per digit in the
[ten-digit] number one-billion."  In other words, ten seeks.  And with
real data probably less.

What will be -killer- though is *building* that tree, and you would
probably have to resort to some high volume COBOL-style unit-record
processing techniques to maintain updates to the table.  Try to do
interactive updates to that puppy and it you'll probably find yourself
eating stale dog-food.  ;-)