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Microsoft

Microsoft Wants $1M of Larry Ellison 239

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-there-is-a-bet dept.
Jabberwocky writes "Well, it didn't happen overnight, but Microsoft claimed that on Wednesday it will be able to demonstrate that it can indeed meet the $1 million challenge issued by database arch rival Oracle in November 1998. The whole thing hinges on whether or not "anyone using Microsoft's SQL Server with a 1 terabyte TPC-D database to run a standard data-warehouse business query within 100 times of Oracle's best published performance." Microsoft is aparantly going to give it a shot using SQL Server 7.0 which it just released. "
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Microsoft Wants $1M of Larry Ellison More

Microsoft Wants $1M of Larry Ellison

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  • Sure, Windows NT can be ``run'' on a machine that costs $16 million. I'll even build you one. Mail the check to:

    Erich P
    324678 Georgia Tech Station
    Atlanta, GA
    30332-1020

    Once I recieve the check, I'll get the computer to you ASAP. I'll even throw in Next-Day air shipping for free!

    :-)

  • The drive is probably full from all those
    memory.dmp's they are trying to debug =)
  • The challenge specifically refers to SQL Server 7.


    --
  • While for folks like me (a sysadmin for a web shop) this type of big muscle flexing seems pointless, there are folks out there who are getting terabyte-sized databases, and need a real system to manage it.

    Microsoft wants us to believe that NT and MS SQL can scale ... and Oracle wants to prove that they can't.

    As for mySQL ... I don't think that it even comes close to supporting terabyte sized databases, so a comparison is kind of pointless. mySQL is fast with smaller databases (a gig or less), and that is where it is best used and considered.
  • say that MS only need to increase the cost of their system by a factor of 50 to match the Oracle performance.

    Oracle's whole argument is that Microsoft simply cannot scale ... not with any amount of money ... Oracle has conceeded that Microsft may be able to provide a cheaper solution, but they argue that for a high-end solution, you simply can't use Microsoft's products.

  • Okay, so MS says they can make a server that is 1/100 the speed of Oracle and Spitfire (or solar flare, or whatever Sun calls that beefy box) for 1/16 the price ($600,000 instead of $10mil).

    Okay, so let's say that they can do that. Let's also be *real* generous and say that MS only need to increase the cost of their system by a factor of 50 to match the Oracle performance.

    This means that MS has to spend $600,000*50=$30,000,000 to match what Oracle could do for 1/3 the price. And that's being generous!

    MS: 1/100 the performance for 1/16 the price.
  • Sorry; just bugged me.

  • Ha! (Score:1)

    by gavinhall ( 33 )
    Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

    Reminds ME of Steve Jobs saying ANYTHING.
  • Posted by stodge:

    If they televise the test watch out for disappearing desktop icons and changing window titles!!! ;)

  • Posted by stodge:

    Fraid not old boy. Well not from the way I see it. It looks to me like Oracle stacked the deck in their favour when defining the challenge to give a good result.

    Microsoft then decided the test wasn't valid to the real world (which might mean they couldnt match the result, or it might not), and devised their own alternative test that gave good results.

    So in my book they both won. Microsoft didn't respond to the exact challenge, but they also showed results from a similar (?) test that gave similar performance.

    What would be a challenge would be to use the same hardware define by an independant third party, using *exactly* the same test as defined by said people. To me (not that I'm an expert) the results prove nothing.

  • Posted by Kastern:

    HAHAHAHAHAHAH!
    MS is really making a Stupid descicion in going against Oracle!!!! Those DA. Now Gates has gone mad.

  • we know they would fabricate evidence videos in a trial - we know because they did.

    can you trust them running a benchmark on their own software? if nothing else, then the sql server is AT LEAST patched for this special case.
  • Oracle is trash.

  • Ummm... so 1000 Gigabyte-sized images? Didn't know we'd hit that point already...
  • Now *THAT* is the competition that Microsoft brings to this market.
    How many years have you worked at Microsoft?
  • Who knows if M$ hacked up SQL Server 7 to take advantage of things and sway the results in their favor? Remember when graphics card manufacturers made their drivers tuned for benchmark programs?
  • You know what would happen. Steve would convince Larry to kill Bill and Steve would finish the exhausted Larry off! Then Steve would rule the computer industry! Woo hoo! Yikes.
    It's far easier to forgive your enemy after you get even with him.
  • I'll just keep using my $600 MySQL server to handle my 100 meg database for the time being, thank you. The majority of the database market doesn't need -- nor can it afford -- a server that can chomp thru 1 terabyte of data in 1 second.
  • Besides, Oracle probably came up with some funky test that will most definitely slow to a crawl on M$'s server... It's rather comical.

    No, its a reasonable multitable join on a large dataset. It doesn't seem out of line to me. They did throw a big box at it--- which MS can't do. But then, that lack of scalability to huge hardware is the point.

  • What, that gigabyte images were used? They're actually common in more areas than GIS: professional digital graphics processing for instance, uses files that are in the hundreds of megabytes for increased colour-depth (like above 32 bit)...

  • It's the TPC-D benchmark, which is an industry standard designed to simulate datawarehousing style jobs. Microsoft don't have anything to compare to oracle's new MVIEWs, which is why they fail.

    However, this isn't the point: in the midrange space (say, a few dozen gigabytes) microsoft are poised to make big inroads, mostly in OLAP where they have a relatively mature toolset available. A quad xeon by compaq is competitive with Sun's E250 and E450 boxes in this space.

    Note also, however, that oracle runs, and runs well, on NT. An oracle engineer told me the other week that they don't really care about the OS at this stage, they just want to sell database products while they complete their preparation for Raw Iron.
  • price for price, you can buy a dual PII-400 from dell for the same price as a top-end G3, and the NT box will win for any real-world tasks like photoshop, CAD, rendering, serving, whatever.

    I bought my mac (7600/132) when i was at college 'cos i needed the high floating-point performance (running mklinux), but apple these days are trading entirely on past goodwill and slick marketing.
  • Under OSS this kind of challenge would become 'Hey, I just found this neat way to make this box go faster. Why don't you have a look at the code and see if you can use or improve it?'

    unlike open source advocates, i have no problems with my ego or my sense of self worth. so i'll take the $$$ instead, ohyes.

  • Well, it ought to be more fun than the Lewis / Holyfield contest, anyway...

    :-)

    I bet is that MS will do it, although possibly not by very much. Seemed like a hell of a boast on Oracle's part...
  • I'm not certain, but I think the benchmark test (which they did publish) does all sorts of stuff that MySQL can't even do.

    Like, transactions, select into, select where in, and so forth.

    Much (most?) of the reason MySQL is so fast is that it doesn't need to log everything it does, because it doesn't let you roll anything back.
  • What, you mean you don't have one at your home?
  • HELLO. Give any software company a few months and they will be able to make their software faster JUST for this specific time. Sure, tweak source until you get it the fastest possible, tweak source, hardware, hardware, source. As far as I'm concerned, this isn't legit, or Oracle should get 6 months to make their software faster too.

    Blah.
  • From microsoft's press release on this it says they used 560 disk drives to do the test. Holy shit. That's a lot of drives...

    Still, it looks like MS SQL Server proved Oracle wrong (as I was pretty sure they would). But I'm afraid it looks like they used a modified SQL Server to do it. I still say that it's because of SQL Server's heritage (Sybase) that it's fast. I'd be willing to be money that Sybase would kick Oracle's butt on this test if they used materialised views (and equivalent hardware) too.

    Matt.
  • The Ultra Enterprise 10,000 system is also known as the "Starfire 10,000". We have at least 6 of them. (I know there are a few more in our Dallas data center, but I don't know how many.)

    - Randy
  • I didn't have any problems connecting... how many times did you try? They just might be having server load problems.
  • And still using TPC-D, as well as claiming Microsoft has not responded, while Microsoft claims they worked in co-operation with Oracle to devise a fair challenge.
    This whole mess is nothing but PR. Why can't they just rely on the systems proving themselves in the field?
  • M$ is happy because it says that Oracle is treating it as competition, but, when it scomes down to it, the system M$ is going to use is going to 1/16 of the the price of the Oracle solution (admittedly a lot lower) but is going to struggle to beat the 1/100th performance that Oracle wants?

    Leave it to M$ to distort the truth.
  • Umm, IBM wasn't using SQL Server 7.0, like the oracle challenge states...

    As another note, for that it only took 128 Xeon processors, not too cheap in its own right. Finally the Sun or SGI solution will be a hell of a lot more stable...

    wheee...
  • PostgreSQL is already available under a Free Software license. Better still, it's a BSD/XFree86 style license that appears to be compatible with the GPL.
  • M$ doesn't have a chance, unless they ran it on a Compaq AlphaServer 8400 (or GS140). Then they might have a chance, of course Oracle could then just run their database on the same machine...


    JMHO,

    rbf

    --
    LONG LIVE ALPHA!!!
  • Seems from the responses that nobody noticed this already occured yesterday.

    The result of 71 seconds was from one of Oracle's initial results. They then optimized their database to work better with the specific benchmark and recorded a result of 1 second.

    Microsoft is claiming that they worked with HP, didn't optimize their database to specifically work well on that one single benchmark, but instead used real world business ad-hoc type queries...

    And achieved an average of a 1 second result.

    Thus achieving very similar performance to the solutions from Oracle and IBM for 1/16th the cost.

    Now *THAT* is the competition that Microsoft brings to this market.

    And Larry Ellison can eat his shoe now.

  • But that wouldn't be accurate either.

    Database configuration is seldom so easy. A search on a table could take anywhere from a second to two minutes depending on what sort of indexes you have setup and other optimization techniques.

    yes, they both probably optimized, but in a sense that's how it's going to be done in the real world as well. Nothing wrong with using your tools to optimize the queries.

    Now if they optimized the data, or optimized the engine to work with only that subset of data, I agree that'd be cheating.
  • You don't think this is going to make Oracle think twice about their next version, as well as their pricing structure?

  • I think you misunderstood Ellison's challenge.

    He wasn't saying that Oracle itself was better software. He was saying that Oracle is capable of running on hardware which will more than beat what SQL Server will run on.

    Ellison is a *HUGE* proponent of huge massive servers that cost a lot of money, instead of clusters of smaller cheaper servers.

  • Actually, if you know Ada, PL/SQL is really easy, since it was based on Ada. Go figure.

    -Jake

  • if(is_oracle_challenge(parsetree)) do_fast_oracle_query();

    It wouldn't be the first time a commercial product contains benchmark-specific optimizations. :-)
  • #1 the response period ended already
    #2 they are probably using a modified version of nt/sql 7
    #3 they are probably going to use a multiplier to argue that the cost benefit ratio is better (i.e. they shrink the dataset to get closer results to hide its scalability problems)
    #4 there's still no mention of the tpc-d benchmark
    #5 the microsoft web site that's included in this link is slow as shit! i bet it goes down for the event!

    go kick ass larry!!


    "The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
  • I could use $1 Million.
  • It probably cost them tens of millions of dollars to develop their new and "improved" SQL server. What's $1 million back?
    Besides, Oracle probably came up with some funky test that will most definitely slow to a crawl on M$'s server... It's rather comical.

  • Oh, and anybody acually register and SEE the results of the competition?

    Live!

    Before your very eyes!

    The Man who made the statue of Liberty dissapear, presents the latest Microsoft benchmarks!

  • Both Gates and Ellison are manipulative megalomaniacs.

    Hell, I say throw them AND Steve Jobs in a ring and let's have an old fashiond Texas Death Cage match and kill the survivors!
  • No, no..you didn't read the last part of my first post. We kill the survivors at the end, thereby eliminating egomaina, megalomania and freeing the minds and hands of computing forever...hahahahaha
  • MS's position seems to be that Oracle cheated when they ran their second mark off of pre-cached results, so that made it OK to do it too. Great, I'm impressed.

    I was much more impressed by Oracle's original 71 second mark. That was based on really jamming through 1 Tb of data. When MS publishes a result doing the query the way they claim it's supposed to be done, then we'll have some news.

  • It's been used on linux-kernel this week. Along with the fact that when Microsoft splits, we will have Micros~1, Micros~2, Micros~3 and Micros~4. (I think those should have the extension .com though.)

  • ... the bait hasn't been taken until now. What's
    slashdot coming to?! I expect cats and dogs raining outside any minute...


    Stickboy

    -- MS lackeys not allowed.

  • 100 times faster is more than 100% faster ;-)


    But, it is 1% as fast which is what he said...

    Stickboy

  • its a self fulfilling prophecy
    =)
  • The challenge, as I recall, was specifically directed at SQL Server v7. The fact that IBM's DB2 system sticks it to Oracle is nice, but inconsequential :)

    And as far as the pricetag for the server hardware... it's price/performance, not the actual pricetag, that will probably influence a lot of big corporate buyers. If you REALLY NEED a DBMS that can do a query over a terabyte of data in 1 second or less, you will have a budget to get whatever ballsy hardware you need :)

    Long live big iron.
  • Frankly, I wonder about that too.
    Anybody know why the FSF has not adopted PostgreSQL as its standard sql database?
    Used to be the FSF made decisions like that for technical reasons, because someone there or that they knew though they could do better than an existing free package...
  • Oracle's latest results on TPC-D are reported as 0.71 seconds (using materialized views).

    TPC-D has been sussed & superseded as a reliable benchmark, they're talking about splitting it into TPC-R (just like current TPC-D) and TPC-H (which is truer to the ad hoc nature of the original test).
  • -- Get smart, Rob. Forcing logins to use user preferences is useless and a big liability. Get rid of it.

    Umm... Is this a joke? How else would he implement user preferences?

  • Ha! (Score:1)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 )
    I have to admit - Microsoft has considerable gall. But Oracle did set themself up for this.. if it works.. they'll have major egg on their face. Reminds me of Steve Jobs proclaiming the G3 faster than the PII.

    --
  • The reason that MS won't run SQL Server 7 on comparable hardware is that they know the product isn't as scalable as Oracle7i. The implication is that if MS can run something reasonably close to Oracle's result on shitty hardware then they must be able top kick Oracle's ass on great hardware.
    The unfortunate fact is that Oracle would probably still beat MS on the $50,000 machine. The reason they ran a multi-million $ machine in the benchmark is because that is what the benchmark test called for, not because they "needed" it.
  • Wouldn't that be a dishonest thing to do?

    -Steve
  • I'd guess that Avalon can harness more raw CPU power than an Enterprise, or at least damn close. But the challenge refers to SQL Server 7, and unless SQL Server 7 has been ported to the PVM (which it sure as hell hasn't), you couldn't even run it.

    Secondly, Beowulf-class supercomputer's probably wouldn't handle such a task very well anyway, as Database operations are heavily I/O bound. That's an area where the Enterprise would surely kill Avalon.
  • Of course, the license terms for SQL server state that you may not publish benchmark results without MS permission...wonder why ?
  • Let's see... IIRC, MS compared (under oath and for the record) the download times of two 'comparably equipped machines' in the downloading and installation of MSIE vs. Navigator: The IE machine was running WinXX with a 56k modem and the Navigator machine was running Win3.1 with a 28.8 modem.

    Also IIRC, they later compared a 'feltonized' machine vs. a 'non-feltonized' one to demonstrate poorer performance by the feltonized one. After it was proven that their demo of the 'feltonization' was a conglomerate of snippets from several different machines, they requested and were allowed to redo the test under the supervision of the DOJ attorneys. They redid the test, alright. But they didn't allow the DOJ into the room until *after* all of the 'feltonizing' had been done on two identical laptop PCs. Then they claimed they couldn't reliably demonstrate the decreased performance on the 'feltonized' PC because of the unreliability of the connection speeds of the two different machines.

    It seems to me, this is just another PR stunt by MS to prove that they know how to lie in impressive ways. If they're not going to run SQL7 on the same hardware, they've failed the scalability test from the outset, plus they've given themselves a scapegoat for when they fail to perform within the .01 capability: i.e., Oracle had the advantage with the more expensive hardware.

    I wonder if Rob's new-and-improved /. is recording the addresses of those 'MS is superior' posts (for possible later exposure of MS munchkins for what they are).


  • Gates wouldn't stand a chance again Ellisons
    Ninja Shuriken stars or hand claws. :)

    Then again when Gates lines Compaq and Dell
    executives up in from of him, Ellison might
    take alittle longer.

    Locutus
  • But you cant compare MySQL to Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server.

    Its apples and oranges. The caliber of programs are completely different.

  • I believe that Oracle's already closed down the $1 million dollar offer after about a 3-4 month time with no takers at all!

    Still, I'd like to see the results. I don't think M$ has a chance, so this should be amusing...
  • I wonder if MS will allow someone other than themselves to setup and run this demo. As others have stated, they do not have a stellar track record for videotaped evidence.

    The fact that MS is doing it this way suggests that they have already done the benchmark, and they have figured out a way they think they can turn this to their advantage. So don't be too surprised if they blow the benchmark away, (just don't ask them how they did it, I am sure this would just be a waste of time.)
  • In all my dealings with Microsoft its always someone else at Microsoft's fault :)
  • Thats funny, all of the sudden during the tape, the NT box disappeared and was replaced with a real machine. Hmmmmm.

    Must have been an editing problem.

    ;-)
  • "Three men entah, one man leaves!"
    "Three men entah, one man leaves!"
    "Three men entah, one man leaves!"

    Where is MadMAx?

  • (c) Associated Press, Redwood Shores, CA - Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was startled today by two masked gunman as he attempted to respond in a demonstration to Microsoft's assertion that SQL Server would indeed meet his database perfomance challenge issued last year. Amid startled gasps in the crowd, one of the attackers held a gun clearly labeled 'SQL Server 7.0' to Mr. Ellison's head while the other took a bag containing the challenge prize of $1 million.

    The two men were apprehended shortly thereafter, and were identified as William H. Gates, III and Steven Ballmer. Ballmer was heard at the police station as saying, 'seeya, Billy, I TOLD YOU SQL Server 7.0 could get that million dollars', while a dejected Gates could be heard muttering disgustedly 'just shut up, you bald dork'. A clearly aggravated Melinda Gates would only comment that 'this is absolutely the last time I'll ever bail out those two assholes... jeez, the DOJ mess was bad enough'.

    Microsoft immediately announced that rumors of a new WB series, 'When Geeks Go Bad - Billy and Steve, the Thelma and Louise of High Tech', were completely unfounded.

  • Read the article. It says they used IBM's BD2
    not Miscrosofts database software. This
    challenge was about ORACLE vs Microsoft not
    ORACLE vs IBM. Also, IBM used a 32 node cluster
    of their netfinity and db2 servers to accomplish
    this.

    Quote: "32-node configuration used in this benchmark" IT used GigaNet's cLAN DB2 and IBM's serial storage Architecture.

    Each Netfinity server has 4 Xeon processors each with 2MB onchip cache. In total that's 128 with 64 megs of on chip cache.

    Oracle's machine used only 64 processors.

    IBM DIDN'T WIN.
    ********************************************
    Superstition is a word the ignorant use to describe their ignorance. -Sifu
  • Yeah... and Oracle didn't use MATERIALIZED VIEWs?
    (Thats pre-calculated results of querys... Oracle 8.1.5 has it MS SQL 7.0 doesn't)
    'It's kind of fun to do the impossible.'

  • ...that finally met the challenge.

    Wasn't one of the points that Larry Ellison trying to make that Microsoft was effectively prohibiting end-users from performing this type of benchmark that would ultimately show the MS product in a bad light. (Did the EULA claim that such a benchmark constitute some sort of reverse-engineering or something?) I seem to recall some discussion that whoever might claim the $1M might find themselves in legal trouble with MS.


  • ERROR

    The requested URL could not be retrieved



    While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/style.css

    The following error was encountered:

    Access Denied.

    Access control configuration prevents your request from being allowed at this time. Please contact your service provider if you feel this is
    incorrect.


    Hmmm... Wat are they trying to hide?

  • Has MicroSoft said how much slower they think they'll be?
  • Yeah!

    Both of those products are propietary software. I couldn't care less about who wins.

    GNU SQL will beat them all once its ready. Yes, GNU is creating its own SQL database.

    Azul
  • I don't know who's better, but I know who will be better in some months.

    A GNU/Linux box with GNU SQL searches and a few Perl scripts.

    Azul.
  • Yeah, but it has right at the top of the site [microsoft.com] in big red letters that the database is 1.01 terabytes. My point was that they chose the relatively large grain data set (my math shows 300k/image) which minimizes the stress of the 1Tb test.

    My hometown isn't covered and the spots that I looked at that were close seem to all get me to "cloudy_day.gif". ')
  • Yes, what a joke that site is. A terabyte of data - but its like 1000 really big pictures. Ooo it
    really takes a powerful RDBMS to keep track of
    1000 pieces of information. Access might even be
    able to do it.
  • just as in the famous Win98 demo, I'm sure sure that M$ will get a wonderful blue screen of death when they try this challange...

    after all, do you really thing that they have anywhere near all the bugs worked out of SQL Server 7, and then trying to tweek it on top of that???

    perhaps using the new version will work against them.
    ---
  • This was at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/1999/0 3-16sql.htm

    There's also a long piece on how they think Oracle tried to skew the contest. It's interesting, but I don't know nearly enough about high end servers to comment.


    This month, as part of the premiere event of the "getting Results" Web cast series, Microsoft released its response time to the same query issued in the Challenge, announcing that it had achieved an execution time of 1.075 seconds on query five, significantly faster than Oracle's original mark and on par with Oracle's recent result of 0.7 seconds. Microsoft's results were achieved using Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 Enterprise Edition for a total cost of less than $600,000.

    "Our solution not only matches Oracle's performance, but it does so at about one-sixteenth the price," says Leland. "It demonstrates that Microsoft offers powerful data warehousing and business intelligence solutions at a cost of ownership that is in line with real-world business realities. That's the core of our approach: to provide business solutions that drive down the cost of ownership and maximize return."

  • As you're allowed to precompute so much of it during the load phase, just compare last yers Oracle with this years Oracle results....

    99-02-12
    Sun UE10000 (64 400MHz US, 64 GByte ram)
    Oracle8i 8.1.5.2
    35,878.1 TPC-D (QphD)
    Q5 took 0.7 seconds
    Database Load Time: 46 hours 59 minutes

    98-06-01
    Sun UE10000 (64 336MHz US, 64 GByte ram)
    Oracle8 8.0.4.2
    5660.5 TPC-D (QphD)
    Q5 took 1315.5 seconds
    Database Load Time: 27 hours 2 minutes 2 seconds

    Does anyone think that Suns tapes this year are slower than last years?....

    (Both are 1 TByte db size)

    I'll laugh whichever way it goes :-) :-)

    Erik



    Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
  • Oracle is trash.

    Great comment, backed up with lots of very understandable and informative facts. Armed with this, I think I'm going to my boss and suggest that we dump all our Oracle-based applications here at MCI and use... What?

    Yes it's expensive, but it's very scalable, very reliable, and it's [GASP] portable! I can run my apps on something like 20 different hardware platforms without changing a single line of code. Try that with SQL Server.

    SQL Server is trash. [GRIN]
  • Come on people, try to at least read the article before asking stupid questions. They are going to justify SQL Server as better based upon price. MS is not stupid, they write shitty operating systems but they aren't stupid.


    At that time, Tong predicted, "Larry's multimillion-dollar computer will beat our $50,000 one by two-tenths of a second, because it's his test. It's likely that the cost of
    the Oracle database software alone will be more than the whole thing for Microsoft, including SQL Server, consulting, software, and hardware."

  • hmmm, just a thought does this test say what the preconditions are? If SQL server is vaugely sensible it will act like oracle and cache query results....

    can anyone guess what would happen if M$ where to run the test query 10 mins before anybody comes through the door - and then runs it again having done nothing in the meantime.

    maybe I'm a cynic, but....

    Tom

  • I wasn't suggesting that they cache the table - mearly the results... so while the query might need to access 1Tb of data if it only reuturns 64Mb of data the caching issue ain't so tough.

    That said there has already been one response that lays out the terms of the challenge more clearly... which takes this sort of bahaviour into account.

    There have also been some comments that MS is likely to only scrape through this challenge - I don't belive their marketing is that stupid.

    I would expect them to show a very slim margin between themselves and Oracle - probably with them coming out on top. Quite how they will do this I do not know but they would not put themselves in this position if they did not think that they could walk out on top.
  • the challenge was not extended to intel platform data warehouses, rather SPECIFICALLY to SQL Server 7.0

    IBM only showed that they can spank Oracle with DB2.

  • Who TF can even afford the Sun machine they tested on???

    There is an Enterprise 10000 in the building where I work.

  • One, I think they're doing it for the money =)

    Two, Oracle could turn around and point out that MS struggled and strained just to *finally* come within a factor of 100 of Oracle's wares...

    Microsoft needs to do more than get within a factor of 100, if they don't get within a factor of 16, then Oracle still 'wins' because that is what Microsoft claims the cost-benefit of their solution vs. the Oracle one is. Even if they can do that, Oracle still wins because their solution is still going to be far more reliable.

  • What storage system are they using?

    As an EMC employee, I hope they're using our stuff. (We make storage systems with up to 9 terabytes, and strive to have the best performance, the best reliability, and the highest prices, or something like that.)

    I'm not in the part of the company that deals with such things, but I wouldn't be surprised if we have a partnership deal with Oracle, whereby their software is specially optimized for our storage systems.
  • > Who TF can even afford the Sun machine they tested on???

    The people who regularly need to make queries to multi-terabyte databases can afford those machines. :-)

    -Snibor Eoj
  • One, I think they're doing it for the money =)

    Two, Oracle could turn around and point out that MS struggled and strained just to *finally* come within a factor of 100 of Oracle's wares...
  • If I'm not mistaken, clock for clock, a G3 is faster than a P2, in just about every benchmark.

    It doesn't mean Job's claim that an Apple is faster, but clock for clock, an Apple system is faster than a Wintel system, except for the OS bottleneck that is MacOS8x. Of course, it helps that Apple has standard on their high end machines SCSI and high performance video(not 3d video), so if you're willing to pay 1.5 to 2 times as much, you will get a machine that is 1.5 to 2 times as fast, but that was in the 3000 range last I checked. Of course, the Celeron changes all that, but clock for clock, a G3 is still faster than a Celeron. The only problem being Celerons have hit 450MHz, while the G3 is currently set to about 400 MHz or so.

    If you do price performance, then the P2 beats the G3, but then again, Intel also has egg on its face, for the Celeron beats out the P2; in terms of absolute price performance, the AMD K6 beats out the Celeron even, barely...

    If all you want to express is Anti-Apple sentiment, feel free, but don't knock PowerPC/G3. Some of the fastest computers in the world use that CPU; IBMs Blue computers, if I'm not mistaken, use a high end architected version, 64 bits and everything.

    AS
  • Well, as of 4pm EST on Mar18, there're no signs of victory on Microsoft's website. Oracle, on the other hand, has a brand new challenge here [oracle.com]. They claim $283QphD (whatever that means).
  • Anon, you should've read the original challenge.

    Oracle specified specific query in a certain standardized database benchmark. If memory serves me right, the meaning of the query was: what share of the products was shipped domestically vs. internationally?
  • Hmmm... it makes me really nervous that the same query in the test took betweem 1.5 and 0.06 seconds (almost 30 times difference). As I understood it, "material views" is a glorified way of saying "we know there will be a query WHERE DAY>#1/1/1999#, so we'll stealthly create an extra column that equals .T. for 1/1/1999 and later."

    So, how do you benchmark database engines? By randomizing the query to WHERE DAY IN (#1/1/1999#, "2/12/1990#,...)?
  • some background on the 1M challenge.
    Oracle performed the test on a $16M machine (64 cpu machine if i remember correctly). No way on earth NT could be installed on such a machine (not in the near future at least.) The test was sorta partial because of way data was processed before queries were run on top of it.

    How does mySQL measure up to all of this?
  • couldn't register 'cause the m$ SQL server was full. great PR move guys.
    -Lkb

    Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e14'

    [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Can't allocate space for object 'microsoft_registration' in database 'CreateTech' because the 'default' segment is
    full. If you ran out of space in Syslogs, dump the transaction log. Otherwise, use ALTER DATABASE or sp_extendsegment to increase the size of the segment.

    /microsoft/gettingresults/event_setup_p.asp, line 67
  • Read the original post. He said If you throw a G3 chip to the ground, and merely drop the PII (<STRONG></STRONG> emphasis mine).

    Newton's law does dictate that the acceleration of both will be the same 9.8 m/s^2. BUT, if the initial speed of the G3 is greater than the initial speed of the PII (0 m/s), and the distance is the same, then the G3 should have a higher speed all the way through, and hit the ground faster (air resistance notwithstanding).

    Of course, it doesn't really matter all that much...
    --
    - Sean
  • If this Microsoft SQL Server is anything like the TerraServer it had on the web for satellite imaging maps.. Oracle gets to keep its million.

    yacko

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