PRESS:NEWEST TPC-D BENCHMARK

NEWEST TPC-D BENCHMARK REINFORCES POWERFUL AND AFFORDABLE INFORMIX DATA WAREHOUSING SOLUTIONS Informix and Sun Demonstrate Leading Performance and Price/Performance For Data Marts and Data Warehouses MENLO PARK, Calif., September 22, 1997 -- Informix Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: IFMX), the leading provider of innovative database technology, today again demonstrated the industry-leading performance needed to grow from data marts to the most demanding Enterprise warehouse applications. Also showcasing the industry's most affordable data warehousing solution, Informix price/performance results, as measured by the Transaction Processing Performance Council 100 GigaByte (GB) Benchmark D (TPC-D) announced today, significantly surpass all competitors in this category, with performance results that clearly outperform database vendors including IBM, Oracle and Tandem. Benchmark Reinforces Affordable and Powerful Informix Data Warehouse Solution The benchmark run using INFORMIX-OnLine Extended Parallel Server (XPS) Database and Sun Enterprise 450 server demonstrates price/performance of $755 QphD@100GB and performance of 1,069 QppD@100GB. Informix proved a dramatic cost savings of over 92%, or millions of dollars, over NCR/Teradata's $9,043 QphD@100GB for comparable data warehousing performance, and that NCR required 40 times the number of CPUs to achieve a performance gain of only approximately 35%. Informix price/performance compared to Oracle's nearest UNIX-based performance result, $1,920 QphD@100GB, translates to providing customers with a cost savings of almost 60%, or hundreds of thousands of dollars for the same performance when choosing to implement their data warehouses on Informix. These results also surpass IBM's nearest performance result of 755 QppD@100GB by almost 41% using 96% fewer CPUs, consequently beating IBM's closest price/performance of $6,935 QphD@100GB on DB2 to again save customers millions of dollars. Finally, Informix beat Tandem's performance measured at 392 QppD@100GB by over 173% and provides a cost savings of over 94% for the same performance when compared to Tandem's NonStop SQL price/performance of $12,303 QphD@100GB. "Informix's close working relationship with Sun is dedicated to helping companies deploy the most powerful, affordable and scalable data warehouse solutions on the market," said Brett Bachman, vice president, general manager of Enterprise Products at Informix. "This TPC-D strongly reinforces the performance, scalability and cost-effectiveness of Informix's DSA-based database running on Sun's operating system and hardware servers. With this benchmark, Informix has once more shown that customers can expect the highest level of performance for enterprise applications at a tremendous cost savings." "Right on the heels of a record-breaking TPC-D result running INFORMIX-OnLine XPS on our largest system, the E10000, it's remarkable to see the Sun and Informix combination that yields performance leadership on the high-end, is also the performance and price/performance leader in the workgroup class of server," said Doug Kaewert, Director, Global Partners at Sun. "Customers get more leverage when they can choose a single platform combination -- INFORMIX-OnLine Extended Parallel Server running on Solaris -- that yields the best performance across data marts and data warehouses of all sizes." Informix Industry-Leading DSS Performance and Scalability Over the past several months, Informix has posted impressive performance benchmarks, regardless of platform, that reiterate its database technology lead and its near-linear scalability achieved with INFORMIX-Dynamic Scalable Architecture. Today's benchmark strongly reinforce the Informix/Sun recent industry-leading TPC-D@300GB, as well Informix proven results on multiple platforms and hardware architectures, providing customers with data warehousing seemless solutions from departmental data marts to the largest data warehouses. The Sun/Informix Benchmark The TPC-D result was based on the Enterprise 450 Server configured with a four processor configuration, four GB of memory, using INFORMIX-Online Extended Parallel Server 8.2. Following are based on comparable UNIX 100GB test results as of 09/19/97. Vendor Database Ver PowerQppD@100 GB ThroughputQthD@100 GB Price/Perf$/QphD@ 100 GB #CPU AvailableDate Sun Informix 8.2 1069 359.4 $755 4 12/15/97 DEC Oracle 7.3 972 506.0 $1,920 12 02/28/97 IBM IBM DB2 PE 1.2 755 384.0 $6,935 96 03/28/97 NCR Teradata V2R2 1441 1150.0 $9,042 160 11/15/96 Tandem TandemSQL/MP 3.0 392 214.0 $12,303 16 08/15/96 About the Benchmark The Transaction Processing Performance Council is an independent organization formed by member companies across the computer industry. The TPC-D benchmark examines system performance in a decision support workload. It differs from OLTP benchmarks in testing system performance in workloads with few transactions involving a large amount of data and more complex query statements. Three of the five primary metrics are: Query Processing Performance (QppD) which measures raw query execution when all available resources are concentrated on a single query; Query Throughput (QthD) meant to show the systems ability to process concurrent queries; and Queries Per Hour ($/QphD) a measure of price performance calculated dividing five-year cost of ownership by the composite of the two performance metrics. INFORMIX-Online Extended Parallel Server OnLine XPS, based on Informix's industry-leading Dynamic Scalable Architecture (DSA), extends DSA to loosely-coupled or shared-nothing computing architectures, including clusters of symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) systems, massively parallel processing (MPP) systems and will soon provide support for single node SMP systems. It provides customers with exceptional performance and scalability for large decision support applications such as multi-terabyte data warehousing projects. OnLine XPS is the only portable, parallel database to deliver true "parallel everything" SQL functionality critical for effective database management in the multi-terabyte range. About Informix Informix Software, based in Menlo Park, Calif., provides innovative database technology that enables the world's leading corporations to manage and grow their business. Informix is widely recognized as the technology leader for corporate computing environments ranging from workgroups to very large OLTP and data warehouse applications. Informix's database servers, application development tools, superior customer service, and strong partnerships enable the company to be at the forefront of many leading-edge information technology solution areas. More information about Informix is available via the World Wide Web at http://www.informix.com. ### The following are worldwide trademarks of Informix Software, Inc. or its affiliates, registered in the United States of America: INFORMIX and Dynamic Scalable Architecture. All other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.