Oracle Fined For Benchmark Claims

pickens writes "Information Week reports that the Transaction Processing Council, which sets benchmarks for measuring database performance, has fined Oracle $10,000 for Oracle's ads published August 27 and September 3 on the front page of the Wall Street Journal which violate the 'fair use' rules that govern TPC members by 'comparing an existing TPC result to something that does not exist.' The ads said to expect a product announcement on October 14 that would demonstrate that some sort of hybrid Oracle-Sun setup would offer two-digit performance on the TPC-C online transaction processing test compared to IBM's 6 million transaction per minute result on its Power 595 running AIX and DB2. The TPC Council serves as a neutral forum where benchmark results are aired and compared. 'At the time of publication, they didn't have anything' submitted to the council says Michael Majdalany, administrator of the council adding that that Oracle is free to use TPC numbers once it submits an audited result for the Sun-Oracle system. Fines by the TPC are infrequent, with the last action — a $5,000 fine — levied against Microsoft in 2005 for unsupported claims about SQL Server. 'It takes a fairly serious violation to warrant a member being fined,' says Majdalany."

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

By two digit performance they mean two digits followed by 6 other less significant digits.

Basically >10 million per minute

Re:$10k? That's nothing.

[illumin8]

Value for money, 10 Grand was a steal.

Funny thing: I wanted to get a quote for the Sun/Oracle Database Machine that they are advertising as having these ungodly performance numbers. You know how Oracle licenses their database software per CPU? Well, they have extended their ungodly license to their Exadata storage with a $10,000 per HARD DRIVE license. Yes, that's correct. Oracle takes standard Intel based Sun servers, loads them up with SATA drives, and charges you a $10,000 per spindle license fee to store data on them. This is their business model.

Does anyone know of any open source alternatives to Exadata? The architecture looks appealing from a performance standpoint: Standard Intel servers with SATA drives connected to a 40 gigabit Infiniband fabric and serving data to Oracle servers, but I'm not willing to pay $10K per spindle to license my storage in the same way that Oracle licenses their database software.

Exadata V2 Details

[Dave500]

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/db/exadata/pdf/exadata-storage-technical-overview.pdf [oracle.com]

Re:I am almost certain ...

[afidel]

Yes, TPC is a trade organization with all of the major players being members. They actually offer a very valuable service which is independently audited and certified results on vendor neutral benchmarks which fairly accurately reflect real workloads. Any changes from the base configuration of the OS or product have to be documented as does the hardware configuration used and the price of the solution. (including discounts, but you better believe I'm asking for at least their published discount)

I find that it's a good place to start when looking for solutions as it gives you a good idea of product performance, pricing level for your needed performance, etc. It also can give you some ideas on what tweaks can bring big performance gains as the vendors generally have their best people helping with these type of published benchmarks so the documented config changes can be very useful if they aren't pure benchmark fluff.