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Oracle Fined For Benchmark Claims
pickens writes "Information Week reports that the Transaction Processing Council, which sets benchmarks for measuring database performance, has fined Oracle $10,000 for Oracle's ads published August 27 and September 3 on the front page of the Wall Street Journal which violate the 'fair use' rules that govern TPC members by 'comparing an existing TPC result to something that does not exist.' The ads said to expect a product announcement on October 14 that would demonstrate that some sort of hybrid Oracle-Sun setup would offer two-digit performance on the TPC-C online transaction processing test compared to IBM's 6 million transaction per minute result on its Power 595 running AIX and DB2. The TPC Council serves as a neutral forum where benchmark results are aired and compared. 'At the time of publication, they didn't have anything' submitted to the council says Michael Majdalany, administrator of the council adding that that Oracle is free to use TPC numbers once it submits an audited result for the Sun-Oracle system. Fines by the TPC are infrequent, with the last action — a $5,000 fine — levied against Microsoft in 2005 for unsupported claims about SQL Server. 'It takes a fairly serious violation to warrant a member being fined,' says Majdalany."
... that this $10,000 fine will cripple Oracle's ability to compete in the future
Even if Oracle knew they would be fined $10,000 it was probably still well worth the cost of the fine + the cost of the ad. Not to mention that receiving the fine has gotten them the front page of Slashdot and probably lots of other tech sites as well.
Value for money, 10 Grand was a steal.
This will surely show them the error of their ways.
I imagine they're getting far more publicity from this than their $10k would have given them in traditional advertising avenues.
$10k is a marketing expense... not a penalty. It won't change anything.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
I'm an embedded engineer so could someone tell me: is two digit performance better or worse than 6 million per minute ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Jesus, since when is commenting that some company got value out of the they paid for a fine make someone a troll?
It's not like I said "oooh, ouch, $10k will really put the hurt on Oracle" like the other 12 people who posted in the first two minutes.
(Yeah, that's my comment that I'm replying to as AC... just in case people are still blowing mod points by marking everything in sight as Troll).
has fined Oracle $10,000...
Wow. How will Oracle ever come up with that kind of cash? Larry Elison might have to sell a seat cushion from one of his yachts to cover the bill.
The $10k fine isn't what Oracle is really being hit with. Depending on how serious the TPC is taken by customers or after MS or IBM run their market-o-tron speak on the actual news, this is an easy to use market strategy against Oracle.
A-queue-the-show....
import system.cool.Sig;
The summary, by calling it "some sort of hybrid Oracle Sun thing" implies the product itself doesn't exist, when in fact the issue is that the results of a TPC test on the product were not vetted by TPC (or maybe the test wasn't even conducted yet, it's not clear) before Oracle decided to advertise them. The "some sort of hybrid Oracle Sun thing" is Exadata 2, and it's a real product.
I stopped taking the moderation here seriously a long time ago. Its not worth the brain cells.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Basically, Oracle takes a calculated risk of a bad reputation vs. making buyers hold off on purchases from competitors for a short time. My guess is that Oracle will be able to produce something living up to the hype.
Why not have a little excitement and see if a competitor will match what Oracle is predicting? I can bet that in the labs a lot of products do a lot better in some areas than the released versions. Maybe IBM can loosen the reins and run with Oracle.
Fun in the capitalist sun. Or is that Sun?
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I'm tempted to mod you insightful.
They are exactly right. The only thing that matters is that the ad might register with some purchasing manager. Accuracy be damned.
Meanwhile the honest db developer/supporter is irreparably harmed. They can't possibly defend it.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The group that is responsible for selecting DB's for the large scale customers Oracle is after is a relatively small select(*)(pun intended) group of people. I attend a national DB conference every year for going on 10 now and I see the same people. Word like this gets out and around. $10k seems like nothing but the fact of them getting fined gets to the people responsible for the product selection and HURTS A LOT more than a $10K fine. I assure you I will be harrassing the Oracle engineers and sales people about this and ensuring my boss, the one who signs the checks is WELL aware of the issue so he can squeeze oracle like the slightly rotten grape it really is....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Microsoft does this for years..
I would imagine the fine was more for embarrassment than for financially hurting Oracle.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Funny thing: I wanted to get a quote for the Sun/Oracle Database Machine that they are advertising as having these ungodly performance numbers. You know how Oracle licenses their database software per CPU? Well, they have extended their ungodly license to their Exadata storage with a $10,000 per HARD DRIVE license. Yes, that's correct. Oracle takes standard Intel based Sun servers, loads them up with SATA drives, and charges you a $10,000 per spindle license fee to store data on them. This is their business model.
Does anyone know of any open source alternatives to Exadata? The architecture looks appealing from a performance standpoint: Standard Intel servers with SATA drives connected to a 40 gigabit Infiniband fabric and serving data to Oracle servers, but I'm not willing to pay $10K per spindle to license my storage in the same way that Oracle licenses their database software.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Looks like somebody beat you to it ^_^
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
It's Oracle, so, the appropriate statement for determining the value of a first post would be:
select * from dual;
Pay special attention to the field name.
More Twoson than Cupertino
http://www.mysql.com/
That'll teach Oracle!
I get 5 new mod points every 24 hours whether I use them or not. Which is awesome, but I don't even come here all that often.
yep, I suspect insulting the moderation system here is one of the easier ways to get modded up. In retrospect I should have requested that people not mod it up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
I can't believe nobody has brought up this nugget..
Seems like a lot until you realize they have almost $3B in the bank.
Yep. That's what Oracle salespeople will be saying for the next year.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
This ad was on the back of the Economist 3 or 4 weeks ago... can they be sued for that too? I felt the ad was very very misleading and meant to trick all those MBA guys who want to pretend like they know what they are doing.
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/db/exadata/pdf/exadata-storage-technical-overview.pdf
To get modded insightful, just s/Obama/Bush/g.
To wit:
1. Why are US troops leaving Iraq on the schedule set by George W. Bush?
2. Why did Obama reauthorize warrantless wiretaps?
3. Why is Obama going to miss his promised date for closing Gitmo?
4. What happened to Obama's promise of tax cuts for 95% of the population?
5. If the economy is so bad, and the situation in Afghanistan so crucial, WTF is Obama doing pimping Chicago for the Olympics?
>> a $5,000 fine -- levied against Microsoft in 2005 for unsupported claims about SQL Server.
Gee that fine will have made Microsoft change their ways. NOT.
By being so soft on members the TPC have totally undermined their own credability.
Everyone said Oracle had no experience in the hardware and systems business. This pretty much proves they can run with the big boys.
So now IBM can say, "Not only did Oracle get fined for an ad in the Wall Street Journal for untrue facts, their fine was double what Microsoft received for a similar infraction."
Double the punishment a known and convicted monopolizer and business abuser received.. Hmm...
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
A bit misleading, but Microsoft can now say,
"Looking to implement MySQL? The corporate parent of MySQL was fined for publishing untrue statements about database performance in the Wall Street Journal"
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
Gear the punishment to sales. For example, in Europe the traffic fines are related to the person's income. So the head of Nokia got a speeding ticket for 12 million dollars.
In this case estimate how many sales were affected by this lie, and make the fine equal to the estimated profit on those sales. Then this type of problem would never happen again.
Wait, never mind, I forgot we are talking about a company based in the United States of Corruption.
I come here for the love
Every Oracle agreement includes language that Thou Shalt Not Publish Benchmarks. And they're really serious about it - if you use Oracle DB, you can't publish any benchmarks. I wonder if this isn't someone's payback
Advice: on VPS providers
Funny thing: I wanted to get a quote for the Sun/Oracle Database Machine that they are advertising as having these ungodly performance numbers. You know how Oracle licenses their database software per CPU? Well, they have extended their ungodly license to their Exadata storage with a $10,000 per HARD DRIVE license. Yes, that's correct. Oracle takes standard Intel based Sun servers, loads them up with SATA drives, and charges you a $10,000 per spindle license fee to store data on them. This is their business model.
Does anyone know of any open source alternatives to Exadata? The architecture looks appealing from a performance standpoint: Standard Intel servers with SATA drives connected to a 40 gigabit Infiniband fabric and serving data to Oracle servers, but I'm not willing to pay $10K per spindle to license my storage in the same way that Oracle licenses their database software.
Look at Sun Thumpers: they're 48-disk storage servers that use ZFS to RAID data. Use iSCSI and high-end NICs to connect to Oracle. You can get multi-port 10GbE NICs for a reasonable cost these days, and a lot of vendors include iSCSI offload.
Some 10GbE switches now have very low latency, comparable to Infiniband. Or, if you've already got Infiniband infrastructure, just keep using that.
For performance, pack the Thumpers with RAM (I think 128GB+ is doable), and use the ARC cache feature of SUN Solaris in combination with a FusionIO SSD PCI-E card. Those things will do 100,000 IOPS, or more. The card acts as a cache for the slower spinning disks, and the RAM acts as a final layer of cache. You can get 128GB of RAM, upwards of 1TB of SSD, and 80TB of disk per 4U device. That's a good combo, and can be had for under $100K per box ($2K/drive), even if you get really high-end components.
Stripe your databases across a couple of those boxes, and you could get gigabytes/second and almost 1M IOPS for a tiny fraction of the price you're paying now. You'd probably also save on power usage and rack-space usage too. You might lose a few niceties though like fancy replication systems, but ZFS can do snapshots (however, synchronized snapshots across multiple boxes is probably impossible).
$10,000? I'm sure Oracle is reeling from that one.
There's no such thing as bad publicity.
Oracle gets it's name in the news and loses nothing.
Oracle doesn't sell based on performance.
Oracle doesn't sell based on how noble a customer thinks they are.
Oracle sells based on how well their name is recognized.
The sales bots sell to the purchasing drones, and all that matters are graphs with claims - true or not - and brand recognition.
That's how IT works.
The scant minority that aren't morons will look at the actual capabilities of the product.
Oracle will win or at least be highly competitive in that regard.
I know it's hard for you to understand, and that with your low UID you like to act superior and then mod people down with your alt accounts, but there's no need to trot out personal insults when someone makes a valid point you simply wish wasn't true.
Faggot.
Troll? I thought it was rather funny.
Great, I need a good fight to watch over the next few months. I'm sure Larry Ellison won't disappoint.
I called it a mighty Sperm Whale, she called it Finding Nemo.
According to Wikipedia, Oracle's operating income is US$8.32e+09.
If we compare it to a nice salary of, say, $100K, the $10K fine would be equivalent to fining the hypothetical person 12 cents.
Where to I sign up?