Re: lies damn lies and benchmarks

Mike Ault <mikerault_at_earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>Looking at the most current top ten values overall Oracle achieves a
>TPCC/CPU-MGHTZ rating of 8.11 beaten only by Symphonies 8.24 (whatever
>the heck Symphony is) SQL2000 comes in 4th place at 3.36. The most
>bang for the buck comes in with Oracle's 1,019,668.87 per
>TPCC/CPU-Mghrtz against SQL2000 at 1,592,560.56. UDB comes in at 4.92
>and a cost of 1,733,687.45. UDB beats SQL2000 in TPCC/CPU-Mghtz but
>looses in overall price. Oracle beats both handling when you remove
>the obscuring junk in the numbers.

Who cares about TpmC/MHz ? That's a meaningless metric. CPU performance is only loosely correlated with the clock speed, if you look at the SPEC CPU benchmarks, you can find a 750MHz PA-RISC outperforming a 1.5GHz Pentium 4.

Oracle is a great database, with many impressive and useful features. TPC-C shows it scaling to impressive levels, but it (and Unix vendors) fall down dramatically on price/performance in the mid-range. Unless Oracle and HP/IBM/Sun want to give up this ground to MS, they better do something to fix this.

For example, compare these two results:
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=102031101 http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=102012901

These show two benchmarks both published earlier this year, with an IBM/SQL Server system outperforming an Compaq/Oracle system that cost twice as much.

-- 
Andrew Mobbs - http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~andrewm/