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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.
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).
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;
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.
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 ?
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.
MySQL is a "fix" in roughly the same way that what the vet to my cat's balls was a "fix".
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Yeah, but that all their competitors will be able to market by saying "Oracle got fined for lying about benchmark claims"? That's priceless.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/db/exadata/pdf/exadata-storage-technical-overview.pdf
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.