Re: Larry Ellison comments on Microsoft's benchmark

All companies try to lie with statistics while being technically accurate. That's why you have to read every company's benchmarks, their competitors' benchmarks, and everyone's critiques of everyone else's benchmarks.

Ivana Humpalot wrote in message ...
>X-No-Archive: yes
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>In the Analyst Q&A following Oracle's 4th Quarter Earnings Report,
>Larry Ellison made some very interesting remarks about Microsoft's
>recent SQL Server 2000 benchmark.
>
>If Ellison's comments are true then Microsoft is basically
>defrauding their customers with their benchmark.
>
>I have included below the transcript of his comments.
>
>Is Larry Ellison lying or is Microsoft really defrauding their
>customers with their benchmark?
>
>You can listen to the audio here:
> http://www.nasdaq.com/reference/broadcast_oracle.htm
>
>Near the 1 hour mark, an analyst from Paine Webber asked a question
>about Microsoft SQL Server 2000. The following is Larry Ellison's
>response:
>
> In terms of microsoft.. we have no concerns at all. They still
> can't scale. They have this benchmark that they got out which
> works only in the laboratory.
>
> The only problem with microsoft's benchmark is that it has a
> 3-hour mean time of failure. What they have done is to chop up
> the database in to 10 separate little databases, and if any one
> of those databases fail it brings down the entire system, or
> worse yet gives wrong results.
>
> So it is a completely bogus benchmark.
>
> I mean, it meets the letter of the benchmark rules, however by
> their own statistics in terms of availability they have a very
> very short mean time of failure.
>
> No one seriously will ever use this kind of system.
>
> They have 10 separate computers each with 10% of the database.
> If you want an 11th computer you have to unload the entire
> database from the 10 computers and then put 9.1% of the database
> on the 11 computers. If one of the computers fail you lose 10%
> of the database. And that means when you use your query.. you
> don't get the right answer back.
>
> If you use 10 separate systems.. if you believe Microsoft's
> statistics on failure rates.. one failure every 30 days, you are
> going to get a major system outage or wrong results every 3 days.
>
> It is a preposterous benchmark.
>
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Received on Wed Jun 21 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT