Re: Microsoft meets the Oracle challenge?

From: Ketil Z Malde <ketil_at_ii.uib.no>
Date: 1999/03/19
Message-ID: <KETIL-864snhipd3.fsf_at_ketilboks.bgo.nera.no>#1/1


ndm_at_shore.net (Norman D. Megill) writes:

> If you read the MS press release carefully, it appears that all they did
> was simply to build a 1-Terabyte db.

The press release amazed me. One involuntarily gets the impression that MS and HP PC's are equivalent to the Sun(?) and Oracle setup, at a fraction of the cost. And they manage to give that impression in spite of the apparent facts, that MS and HP used what, three months? just to get the 1TB database running at all, and that they clearly didn't win the bet, which expired February.

Quite impressive - the press release, that is.

> So, it appears they falsely claimed to have met Oracle's published
> challenge, which includes a performance benchmark.

I understood it to mean they were going to run TPC-D on it, and publish results on Wednesday? We'll have to wait and see.

> I mean, what they said was a lie, right?

No, it just was very selective in what facts to present, and how they were worded in order to mislead the reader. The general impression you get is that a $600K HP/MS system is equivalen to a $10M Oracle/Sun system, and I bet a lot of people are reading it that way. But the marketeers are too smart to say so in so many words, of course.

It's an exceptional piece of work, any politician would have been proud.

-kzm

-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants
Received on Fri Mar 19 1999 - 00:00:00 CET

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