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Baan index performance, oxym0ron!

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Submitted on: 7/11/2000 11:04:57 PM
By: Steven Hauser  
Level: Beginner
User Rating: Unrated
Compatibility: Informix , Oracle
Views: 8506
 
     Baan Indexes - Anchor your Performance Firmly in the Mud. I do not know about you, but BaanIVc with the "Level 2" Oracle driver has some of the worst indexes I have seen, well, since PeopleSoft anyway. And this is not just Oracle specific, any database will have problems with Baan's indexes, including Informix and DB2.

 
 
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I do not know about you, but BaanIVc with the "Level 2" Oracle driver
has some of the worst indexes I have seen, well, since PeopleSoft anyway. And this is not just Oracle specific, any database will have problems 
with Baan's indexes, including Informix and DB2.
A couple examples from some large tables in implementations I have
seen:
Table TTPPPC231ccc has thirteen indexes. All thirteen have the fields
T$YEAR, T$PERI, T$EMNO, T$SERN. Many other fields are shared too.
What a waste.
Five of the thirteen indexes start with fields that have less than 
five unique values. Only one of the thirteen indexes has a 'head' 
(lead field) with more than a couple thousand values.
Thirteen must be Baan's lucky number.
The huge TTFGLD4xxccc general ledger tables seem to start every 
index with a company number field, guaranteed to be a domain with 
few unique values in any implementation of BAAN. 
So what is the point? All the documentation I have read from
Oracle, Informix, etc., says to model a B-Tree composite index
with a head field that has a large domain with many values distributed
evenly over that domain. This allows the RDBMS optimizer to 
pick the best path to the data.
Hmm... This is exactly what Baan does not do. Why trust the RDBMS
to pick the best path. What does Informix or Oracle know about databases,
not as much as the Dutch boys. With level1 Baan did not even let the 
RDBMS make the index. So Baan now lards the SQL with hints to limit
the effectiveness of the optimizer.
And don't put thirteen indexes on a table, it makes updating very slow.
Maybe if Baan concentrated on engineering instead of conservative religious practices, apartheid and corporate shenanigans they might sell some product. Or maybe they are all shooting smack and
smoking hash in Amsterdam. Ya sure, you betcha.


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