Re: lies damn lies and benchmarks

In article <3cd8ee4e$0$232$ed9e5944_at_reading.news.pipex.net>, you said (and I quote):
>
> I bet it knows exactly how to do it. Intellectual Property can stifle as
> well as stimulate competition, and if Oracle doesn't have the rollback/undo
> mechanism tied up tightly in IP then I'm a banana.

actually, rollback and undo is as old as databases. The old codasyl ones already had the same mechanism. Exactly the same way. I find it hard to believe that Oracle can claim IP on that. They can claim IP on how they implemented it in their database, but the mechanism itself is quite old. It was accurately described long before relational existed and Chris Date also described it in detail in one of his books.

> In fact one of the value arguments in favour of RAC is that you can
> duplicate expensive sun kit functinality on cheap compaq hardware.

Compaq is no more. Or was that the DEC VAX cluster? I wish this industry stopped the takeover mania for a couple of years. Just so that we can all collectively catch up with exactly which technology is the industry standard of the week...

> Can Oracle? What operating system would that be running on and how many
> oracle patches are you applying per year. ever changed an itit.ora
> parameter. What about power or network work in the server room that
> necessitates downtime? FWIW all my Oracle systems have mean time between
> reboots of less than 90 days over the last year. In 80% of cases that
> downtime was due to external circumstances not connected with the database
> platform.

Hmmmmmm. I've just looked today at a production instance that has been running non-stop since January 2001. V8.0 for good measure too. ;-)

> MSSQL is a serious competitor in this market and not just because MS
> marketing is better than Oracle marketing. They are pushing a good product.
>

Doubt it. The good product bit. Only reason people use it is because MS makes it so easy and cheap to use in NT. Nothing else.

-- 
Cheers
Nuno Souto
nsouto_at_optushome.com.au.nospam