Notes Mail server DB sizes?

[MostlyNuts]

Hello all,
I am trying to find out the typical size of a Notes DB admins are running.
Are they <100GB, 200GB, 300GB or greater than that, etc.?

All help is appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
MN

 

[AmazingDominik]

Hi,

Can you be a bit more specific towards the kind of databases you are talking about?

An typical Notes database is between 5Mb and 500Mb. Databases larger then 1Gb exist in some companies, but are very rare. The largest database I have ever seen was 3Gb.

It all depends on the number of documents stored in it and the kind of data that is stored inside the documents.



Kind regards,

Dominik Malfait
dominik@amazingit.com

http://www.amazingit.com

 

[MostlyNuts]

Thanks Dominik,
I am looking for information for my development and SQA teams. It seems someone suggested using data no larger than 10MB for testing against databases and I am trying to convince them that their tests may be invalid. They are doing Oracle, SQL, Lotus, Exch adn others. My point to them is that most customers, in reality, have DBs that are of much greater size than 10MB, especially Oracle.
What I hope this forum can provide me is credibility for the engineers. If I can show them that folks are running DBs that can be from 500MB to 4Tb and greater it will help to verify, along with the market articles from Gartner and ESG, etc.
I do appreciate your input. THis will help get me on my soapbox.

)
Cheers!
Steve

 

[AmazingDominik]

Hi,

First of all: you can not compare a Notes database with any other kind of relational database such as Oracle.

10Mb is definately far to small for Notes testing! When you create an empty R6 mailbox it is already 12Mb in size!

Notes is a document database that stores data in an unstructured way. This offers a lot of advantages when you need to automate supporting processes (and disadvantages when you need to automate primary processes). This is why there is no ERP system on Notes for example, or why you can develop groupware applications 6 times faster in Notes then in other systems ;-)

The size of a Notes database and the way it grows and shrinks is therefore different then from a relational database such as Oracle or SQL server or DB/2.
Notes fiels also have no field length for example. Similar documents (same form) in the same database can have a different number of fields also, a thing that is impossible with relational databases.

On the other hand: because Notes is not a relational database a lot of data is usually duplicated inside Notes databases whenever some kind of relation is needed.

The usage over the network is also different because the way the data is stored and also because a lot of processing is done by the Notes client, and most databases can even be used completely off-line.

Forget about Notes databases of 4TB... Never seen such one myself and having one like this would be bad Notes management. Impossible to replicate to a new remote machine for example. I imagine they might exists in extremely large organizations (WallMart?).

Most organizations will split such large databases into several smaller ones and only replicate the data that is really necessary in each location.

If you want to do performance testing: take a database of 500Mb as a typical database and a database of 2GB as a big database. A mailbox will usually be between 30Mb and 100Mb depending on the quota that is set by the administrators.

Also: a lot will depend on the way the database is populated: do you have a few large documents or do you have many small documents?
Is the majority of the data stored in attachments or just in plain text?

Databases without attachments are always quite small. With attachments they can grow to any size, although Administrators will clean up (archive) most databases that become to big to handle.

And finally the Notes release is important: R5 and R6 will perform differently in the same network. You can have a performace gain up to 50% when running R6 because of the way it replicates and the network compression it uses.

But the thing you must remember is the size of the organization: in a SME a 500MB database is really big, while in a Fortune top 100 company that is a very small database! So you should first look at the target organization: how big are they, and what are they going to store in Notes and in which format?






Kind regards,

Dominik Malfait
dominik@amazingit.com

http://www.amazingit.com