I got a press release this week from Microsoft and while I usually ignore them, this was one that caught me eye. Apparently there's a new TPC-E benchmark that shows off how powerful SQL Server can be. It has both the top performance, and price/performance spots with hardware from IBM (a System x3950 M2 and an x3850 M2 respectively).
The TPC-E is the new benchmark that somewhat supersedes the older TPC-C OLTP benchmark and should provide more real world related performance. It simulates a financial brokerage firm and the types of transactions those firms need. They typically need low latency, high performance types of transactions and data storage, so it's a stressful type of OLTP system.
Given the issues we've had lately in the financial markets, however, perhaps another model should have been chosen. Maybe a Wal-Mart, high volume sales, inventory, and supply chain management simulation would be better.
There are starting to be quite a few submissions for this benchmark, but one thing troubles me about the top ten lists: only SQL Server is represented. To me this is more of a hardware mark now then a database software comparison.
I'd like to think that this means it's the best database for this type of system, but I know plenty of financial institutions that use MySQL, DB2, Oracle, or some other platform. Those databases work well and can be tuned to perform as well as SQL Server.
My guess is none of the other vendors want to spend the time and money to compete with the TPC, especially as I see lots of data warehouse and analytic products coming from IBM and Oracle. I think over time we'll see some competition and then we'll get an idea of how well different databases perform. My bet is that before long, Sun Microsystems will get a MySQL system up there and it will be interesting to see how well it performs. Especially with Fox Interactive Media claiming Sun technology might make MySpace more profitable.
Steve Jones
Steve's Pick of the Week
Dell Releases Monster Laptop - Not sure if I want to carry this beast around, but it's got some horsepower. With quad core CPUs, 16GB of RAM, 2 128GB SSD drives or 2 1 TB of regular disk and 511MB of graphics memory, this might be worth looking at. And it's 9lbs!
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
The podcast feeds are now available at sqlservercentral.podshow.com to get better bandwidth and maybe a little more exposure :). Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.
or now on iTunes!
- Windows Media Podcast - 30.1MB WMV
- iPod Video Podcast - 24.2MB MP4
- MP3 Audio Podcast - 4.9MB
Today's podcast features music by Incompetech. Kevin Macleod has some great compositions in all genres of music. Check him out at www.incompetech.com.
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