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."

Comments

$10k? That's nothing.

[Thornburg]

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.

Re:I am almost certain ...

[TheRaven64]

The five posters below you seem to have all said the same thing, but I'll reply to you:

The $10K isn't important. The $10K is there so that when a customer asks an IBM (or Microsoft or whoever) representative about Oracle's ad claiming that they can beat IBM's numbers, the IBM sales rep can say 'they were fined for publishing misleading and unsupported numbers. They don't actually have a machine that gives those numbers' and move on.