Re: TPC-A and -B Benchmarks

"Sandor (Mr. Oracle7)" writes: |> Just for your information: |> |> Oracle (v6 and Oracle7) *DO* support repeatable reads, *WITHOUT* locking |> whatsoever. (description of how deleted) It is very interesting, considering this information, that Oracle so heavily lobbied within the TPC to have Repeatable Reads *removed* from the TPC-C spec. |> One note: I'm pretty sure Oracle will come up with TPC-C results some time. I |> am not aware of any time scale, but I think TPC-A is still the most |> accepted at |> this time. One of the purposed of benchmarks is that you can compare |> (allthough |> very carefully) figures. If almost nobody is running TPC-C's (at this moment |> only IBM as far as I know, both on AS/400 and RS/6000 with Informix), what |> can |> customers do with these figures, as long as there is nothing to compare it |> with. That's why I think a lot of DB vendors are a bit hesitant to |> immediately |> start doing TPC-C's. As well explained by the Standish report, Oracle has effectively eliminated TPC-As as an effective comparison through their implementation of "discrete transactions" in Version 7, a feature that is clearly there for the sole purpose of improving TPC-A results (the nature of TPC-C eliminates their use). Irrespective of this, the industry has long known that TPC-As are woefully inadequate as a true measure of database performance. Their primary strength was in the number of results published. The TPC-C has been designed to be a more robust test of database functionality, and is a much better indicator of the performance customers can expect to see in REAL applications. IBM and HP have run TPC-Cs with both Onformix OnLine *and* proprietary database systems. Most other major OEMs are in the process of running TPC-Cs (it takes a LOT of time to get a TPC-C into an auditable state). Dave Disclaimer: These opinions are not those of Informix Software, Inc. ************************************************************************** "I look back with some satisfaction on what an idiot I was when I was 25, but when I do that, I'm assuming I'm no longer an idiot." - Andy Rooney