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Home -> Community -> Usenet -> c.d.o.server -> Larry Ellison and million bucks!
Here we go again.
Remember when Oracle 7.1 was released? It set new TPC-C benchmark
records all over the place. But when people started to read the full
disclosure reports they saw a new 'feature' in Oracle 7.1 was being
used: Discrete Transaction. DT was of no real value for customers and
was basically a special feature that was coded in Oracle 7 specifically
for the TPC-C benchmark.
Oracle users: How many of you use the Discrete Transactions feature?
Now Oracle has done it again!
Have you heard about the features "Materialized views" and "Pre-computed
aggregates" in Oracle 8i? These features allow Oracle to pre-compute the
outcome of pre-defined queries during load!
Now I read that "Oracle Corp. will pay $1 million to the first person -- including anyone at Microsoft -- who can demonstrate that MS SQL Server 7.0 is not 100 times slower than the Oracle database when running a standard business query against a large database". More specifically, Oracle is talking about Query no. 5 in the TPC-D benchmark.
I suggest people should not waste their time doing this benchmark because, as expected, Oracle is bending benchmark rules again (at least the spirit of the benchmark).
Oracle claims: "Currently Oracle holds every database performance record in the world including data warehousing (TPC-D)..". Now, let's look at this statement.
At www.tpc.org executive summaries of benchmarks can be obtained. Oracle has published two 1 TB benchmarks, both on Sun. Here are vital stats from these (An Informix 1 TB benchmark is included for comparison)
Hardware DBMS Load time Time for Query 5 Sun Ultra Enterpr. 10000 Oracle 8.04 27:02:02 1315.5 sec. Sun Starf. Enterpr. 10000 Oracle 8i 44:35:00 71.5 sec. Sun Enterprise 6000 Informix 8.21 11:55:23 561.5sec.
Your first impression is probably: Oracle 8i is almost 20 times faster than Oracle 8.0.4!! However, load times are 50% longer, (in fact almost 400% longer than in Informix). This is because Oracle has pre-computed the outcome of all the TPC-D queries (filter, join, aggregate etc.) during load time and stored the results in internal tables. Great stuff for the TPC-D benchmark beacuse all queries are known in advance. So, Oracle 8i is probably reading 20 times less data in this particular case than 8.0.4.
I can imagine that Data Warehouse administrators can't wait to get their hands on these new features because they know that
NOT!
Take care,
-Snorri
--
Snorri Bergmann | Mail: snorri_at_strengur.is Strengur Inc. Armuli 7 | sbergman_at_informix.com 108 Reykjavik Iceland | Phone: +354 550 9000 (9007 direct) http://www.strengur.is/ | Telefax: +354 550 9010Received on Tue Nov 24 1998 - 00:00:00 CST
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