Recommendations for Unix Oracle server

We're in the process of evaluating Unix workstations from various companies for use in statistical analysis and as a small database server. We're probably going to be getting Oracle as a database, but to be honest, I don't know a thing about it (the purchasing decision has kinda been made for us by the University).

What I'd like to know is how I should weigh the different performance measurements these computers claim - and yes, I know to take them with plenty of salt, but it's the best we can do.

The way I see it is, lots of our *operations* are floating point (average, standard deviation, etc.) but I was wondering if anyone had a magic formula on how to weigh that against the handling of the actual data (which, being census data, will be very simple) in memory and on disk. Also, I'm used to ignoring integer performance when comparing workstations, since our statistical package, SAS, does just about everything in floating point -- I wanted to make sure that isn't a dumb idea when buying a machine that will be running a database.

Also, if anyone has any particular experience with Oracle on IBM, HP, DEC, and/or Sun, I'd appreciate any information you can give me.

-- 


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