Re: Larry Ellison and million bucks!

Yeah, but when people use Oracle 8.i for data warehousing they would be using aggregate tables and materialized views. If a big TB data warehouse takes long to load, if the response time is good, who cares ? Our end-users want big queries (4 -5 table joins) fast. I believe, Oracle is trying to take a leaf out of Informix's book and Materialized views and pre-computed aggreggates do the same function as summary tables which are very very useful in multi-dimensional OLAP. I am ticked about the million dollar wager just because I want to see what MS does. Of course, Oracle benchmarks were on a Sun with 64 CPU's. Even if SQL Server 7.0 could scale that high, NT wont let it. Fun to watch !! Snorri Bergmann wrote: > > Here we go again. > > Remember when Oracle 7.1 was released? It set new TPC-C benchmark > records all over the place. But when people started to read the full > disclosure reports they saw a new 'feature' in Oracle 7.1 was being > used: Discrete Transaction. DT was of no real value for customers and > was basically a special feature that was coded in Oracle 7 specifically > for the TPC-C benchmark. > Oracle users: How many of you use the Discrete Transactions feature? > > Now Oracle has done it again! > Have you heard about the features "Materialized views" and "Pre-computed > aggregates" in Oracle 8i? These features allow Oracle to pre-compute the > outcome of pre-defined queries during load! > > Now I read that "Oracle Corp. will pay $1 million to the first person -- > including anyone at Microsoft -- who can demonstrate that MS SQL Server > 7.0 is not 100 times slower than the Oracle database when running a > standard business query against a large database". > More specifically, Oracle is talking about Query no. 5 in the TPC-D > benchmark. > > I suggest people should not waste their time doing this benchmark > because, as expected, Oracle is bending benchmark rules again (at least > the spirit of the benchmark). > > Oracle claims: "Currently Oracle holds every database performance record > in the world including data warehousing (TPC-D)..". Now, let's look at > this statement. > > At www.tpc.org executive summaries of benchmarks can be obtained. Oracle > has published two 1 TB benchmarks, both on Sun. Here are vital stats > from these (An Informix 1 TB benchmark is included for comparison) > > Hardware DBMS Load time Time for > Query 5 > Sun Ultra Enterpr. 10000 Oracle 8.04 27:02:02 1315.5 sec. > Sun Starf. Enterpr. 10000 Oracle 8i 44:35:00 71.5 sec. > Sun Enterprise 6000 Informix 8.21 11:55:23 561.5 > sec. > > Your first impression is probably: Oracle 8i is almost 20 times faster > than Oracle 8.0.4!! However, load times are 50% longer, (in fact almost > 400% longer than in Informix). This is because Oracle has pre-computed > the outcome of all the TPC-D queries (filter, join, aggregate etc.) > during load time and stored the results in internal tables. Great stuff > for the TPC-D benchmark beacuse all queries are known in advance. So, > Oracle 8i is probably reading 20 times less data in this particular case > than 8.0.4. > > I can imagine that Data Warehouse administrators can't wait to get their > hands on these new features because they know that > > 1) Load times don't matter > 2) All queries in the DW are known in advance > 3) DW queries are NOT ad hoc in nature > > NOT! > > Take care, > -Snorri > -- > Snorri Bergmann | Mail: snorri@strengur.is > Strengur Inc. Armuli 7 | sbergman@informix.com > 108 Reykjavik Iceland | Phone: +354 550 9000 (9007 direct) > http://www.strengur.is/ | Telefax: +354 550 9010