** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - RECORD-BREAKING TPC-C RECORD!! **

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Oct. 27 /PRNewswire/ via First! -- Today, Oracle Corp. announced a record-breaking TPC-C open systems benchmark, 9414 tpmC, surpassing the existing performance record, also held by the Oracle7 database. Oracle7's new record is more than two times faster than Sybase's best ever performance and nearly three times faster than Informix's best result. Remarkably, Oracle delivered twice the performance of Sybase's upcoming System 11, but Oracle used only half the number of processors used by Sybase. Informix used even more processors than Sybase to obtain still lower performance. This Oracle7 benchmark not only set the performance record, it also set the all-time price/performance record for high-performance systems at $316 per tpmC. "We're faster, cheaper, better. Cool. Think about it. Then buy Oracle," said Lawrence J. Ellison, Oracle's founder and CEO. The benchmark result dramatically demonstrates the combined power of the Oracle 64-bit Option coupled with Digital's 64-bit UNIX and Alpha hardware architecture. This mission-critical solution provides beyond-the-mainframe performance at a fraction of mainframe cost, something that no other vendor can offer. Oracle7's outstanding performance in these fully TPC compliant, audited and publicly disclosed TPC-C benchmarks is a continuing demonstration of Oracle's unequivocal leadership in parallel database technology for symmetric multi-processors and massively parallel systems. "Because of Oracle's demonstrated linear scalability on SMP, cluster, and MPP architectures, we fully expect even greater performance gains as the number of CPUs and memory increase over the coming year," said Beatriz Infante, vice president of Oracle's Open Systems Division. These outstanding benchmarks are a result of Oracle and Digital's close engineering relationship, including Oracle's in-house use of Alpha systems, which enables Oracle to provide a highly optimized database for Alpha platforms. "For over a decade, Oracle and Digital's collaborative engineering efforts have yielded leading-edge information solutions such as the Digital clustering technology coupled with the Oracle Parallel Server," said Robert Palmer, CEO, Digital Equipment Corporation. With its architecture designed to fully exploit the parallelism of SMP, cluster, and MPP platforms, the Oracle7 Server is the leading open systems database server for both on-line transaction processing and data warehousing. Oracle7 scales to dozens or hundreds of processors, with single production databases serving thousands of users and storing hundreds of gigabytes of data. Enterprise-strength Oracle7 capabilities include industry-leading parallel query, load, and indexing along with unique functionality such as Oracle Parallel Server for clusters, "update-anywhere" replication, and support for "compute anywhere" wireless computing through Oracle Mobile Agents. "The market's acceptance of Oracle's technology lead has accelerated over the last year and has fueled the migration of customer applications and third-party products to Oracle7 from other database products," said Jerry Baker, senior vice president of Oracle's Product and Platform Technologies Division. "This benchmark result confirms what our customers already know- Oracle7 is the only choice for mission-critical open-systems information management." Oracle's result of 9414 tpmC at $316 per tpmC on an 8-processor Digital AlphaServer 8400 compares with the Sybase System 11 result of 4544 tpmC at $396 per tpmC recorded on a 16-processor SUN SPARCcenter 2000E and the Informix result of 3524 tpmC at $495 per tpmC, recorded on a 20-processor Sun SPARCcenter 2000E. In addition, Oracle's price/performance of $316 per tpmC is superior to that offered on any high-performance system, e.g. systems delivering more than 2,500 tpmC. Oracle Corp., a $3 billion company, is the world's largest supplier of software for information management, and the world's second largest software company. The company offers its database, tools and application products along with related consulting, education and support services, in more than 90 countries around the world. For more information about Oracle, please call (415) 506-7000. Oracle's World Wide Web address is http://www.oracle.com/. NOTE: Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation. Oracle7, Oracle Mobile Agents, Oracle Parallel Server and Oracle 64-bit Option are trademarks of Oracle Corporation. All other product or company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective owners.