Re: Sybase MPP shows excellent scalability to 128 CPUs

In article <48bmjs$hje@newsbf02.news.aol.com> nraden@aol.com (NRaden) wrote: : : > I don't think TPC results are even relevant. What do they have to do with > decision support, which is clearly the target market? > : : > Perhaps, but given your response, I wonder if you've built any data > warehouses before. Usage profiles in decision support are not at all > similar to OLTP, which is the domain of TPC. You are over generalizing. The TPC benchmarks vary in characteristics, and are targeted at different usage profiles. TPC-A is a simple debit-credit benchmark. TPC-C (the one currently being run by most vendors) is a more complicated order entry workload. TPC-D, which I believe is still being finalized, is a decision support benchmark with complex queries against very large tables. Many people like to state that all benchmarks are useless, but that is simply not true. Customers should of course look at benchmark results in light of their own workload characteristics -- an ATM requires different database performance than does an executive information system -- but TPC benchmarks in particular have value because they provide a reasonable (but *NOT* perfect) apples-to-apples comparison of products through the mechanism of strict definition and auditing. Like I said, benchmarks are not perfect. They target relatively narrowly defined workloads. Results usually apply only on specific hardware and operating system platforms. The configurations used may be orders of magnitude larger than those needed for smaller businesses. Results get too simplified in the marketing process. But an informed customer can use these benchmark results to make better decisions than would be possible without them One final analogy. Benchmark results are like the numbers you see in car ads. One car has the best time from 0 to 60 MPH. Another has the best time for a quarter-mile. Another has more horsepower, and a fourth advertises more torque. Which one is better? Would you buy any of them based solely on those numbers? Now look at databases and benchmarks the same way. Roy ---------- Roy F. Swonger rswonger@us.oracle.com Any opinions expressed in my notes are solely my own, and not those of my employer. ----------