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."

It will hurt more than you think

[Archfeld]

The group that is responsible for selecting DB's for the large scale customers Oracle is after is a relatively small select(*)(pun intended) group of people. I attend a national DB conference every year for going on 10 now and I see the same people. Word like this gets out and around. $10k seems like nothing but the fact of them getting fined gets to the people responsible for the product selection and HURTS A LOT more than a $10K fine. I assure you I will be harrassing the Oracle engineers and sales people about this and ensuring my boss, the one who signs the checks is WELL aware of the issue so he can squeeze oracle like the slightly rotten grape it really is....

Re:It will hurt more than you think

[Major Blud]

As a DBA, I agree with this. I'm constantly being hounded by salesmen touting their OLTP numbers. I, for one, am glad that this was brought to my attention; it will give me more solid information to use when countering their arguments, as well as forcing them to watch their advertised stats move closely.

Re:I am almost certain ...

[afidel]

The problem wasn't really with the numbers, vendors will give you unpublished TPC results frequently but they have to note that they are not certified results. The big problem was publishing the claims very publicly by putting them in a national paper. To me as a consumer the biggest issue is non-certified results almost never have the accompanying audit report which gives the exact config and cost of the solution. Saying that you have a more scalable platform doesn't mean much to most shops if the cost is $20M to beat IBM's $2M result or if you are doing something hankie like running RAID0.

Effect on MySQL?

[devleopard]

A bit misleading, but Microsoft can now say,

"Looking to implement MySQL? The corporate parent of MySQL was fined for publishing untrue statements about database performance in the Wall Street Journal"