Re: Larry Ellison and million bucks!

Yeah, but when people use Oracle 8.i for data warehousing they would be using aggregate tables and materialized views. If a big TB data warehouse takes long to load, if the response time is good, who cares ? Our end-users want big queries (4 -5 table joins) fast.

I believe, Oracle is trying to take a leaf out of Informix's book and Materialized views and pre-computed aggreggates do the same function as summary tables which are very very useful in multi-dimensional OLAP.

I am ticked about the million dollar wager just because I want to see what MS does. Of course, Oracle benchmarks were on a Sun with 64 CPU's. Even if SQL Server 7.0 could scale that high, NT wont let it. Fun to watch !!

Snorri Bergmann wrote:
>
> 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 11:55:23 561.5
> sec.
>
> 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
>
> 1) Load times don't matter
> 2) All queries in the DW are known in advance
> 3) DW queries are NOT ad hoc in nature
>
> 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 9010
Received on Tue Nov 24 1998 - 00:00:00 CST