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What Happened to Oracle's $1 Million Server Challenge?
Mambo from Africa writes "What happend to the 1 million dollar challenge that Larry Ellison put to users of Microsoft SQL Server 7.0. Did Microsoft who seemed to have taken on the challenge get it, or anyone else for that matter?" Good question. I remember reading about this when it first came out, then the whole matter died. Anyone heard anything about it lately?
At Fall Comdex '98, Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison challenged the IT community to run a standard business query using Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 and a 1 TB TPC-D database at a rate better than 1% of Oracle's best published performance. In mid-March 1999, Microsoft Corp. posted a benchmark result - although not based on the standard TPC-D query 5 test - of 1.07 seconds in executing what the company characterized as an OLAP-based solution that met the original intention of TPC-D.
What does this mean to those of you unfamiliar with the terms used above? Microsoft benchmarked at well better than the 1% rate they had to do to beat the challenge. But they didn't use the benchmark specified by Larry Ellison in the challenge. Based upon the Mindcraft fiasco and other such benchmark numbers from Microsoft, I wouldn't pay much heed to this one either.
AFAIK, nothing ever came after this. I'd assume MS couldn't do it, or else they would have collected.
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REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Feb. 22, 1999--Oracle Corporation today announced another leading TPC-D benchmark on Oracle8i(tm) and Sun Enterprise 10000 Server. This is the latest of 13 leading benchmark results which improves by 70 percent over the previous world record, also held by Oracle8i, and marks the close of the Oracle Million Dollar Challenge. Larry Ellison, Chairman and CEO of Oracle, issued the Oracle Million Dollar Challenge at his keynote during Fall COMDEX in November last year. The challenge was for Microsoft, or anyone else, to make Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 run better than 100 times slower than Oracle8i database running a particular industry standard benchmark query. Microsoft did not respond to the challenge, which has been posted on Oracle's Web site (http://www.oracle.com/challenge/) for the last 3 months.
"Microsoft has had more than three months to respond to the challenge and we haven't heard a word from them," said Jeremy Burton, vice president of Server Marketing at Oracle. "This is because SQL Server 7.0 is years behind in data warehousing technology; they have yet to publish a single TPC-D result. Any customer considering SQL Server should have serious concerns about their failure to demonstrate performance in the critical data warehousing space".
With this new result Oracle maintains its leading position for single system performance and as the overall leader of the data warehousing marketplace. Since Oracle8i was announced, Oracle has published 13 TPC-D results on 10 different hardware platforms and 5 different operating systems. These TPC-D results demonstrate Oracle's performance leadership on the key hardware platforms that our customers are choosing. At the 1Tb scale, Oracle's latest benchmark reached 121,824 QppD (Query processing power TPC-D) and 10,566 QthD (Query Throughput TPC-D) and a price / performance of $283 QphD. Oracle's TPC-D benchmarks were achieved running Oracle8i release 8.1.5.2 on a single Sun Enterprise 10000 server using 9.81 Tb of disk storage. This system configuration is scheduled to be available on August 1, 1999.
- Seth Finkelstein
which is that the TPC-D test involves massive updates and queries all intermingled together, yet M$'s test did not use a single machine, but several, and transactions were directed at specific machines, rather than parceled out by a central server. Also, they had preloaded the database, so there wer no updates and it could well have been optimized for readback only.
At least, that's what I remember. I almost certainly have some of the details wrong. But I do remember they weren't even close to duplicating the effort, only the statistic. Apples and oranges at least.
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It's a fair challenge. Obviously they had to be confident that the competitor lacks key features. Database optimization is not all about having a higher -O flag on your compiler.
;)
I wouldn't say that they weren't risking anything. They gave Microsoft three months to catch up, during which time they could have hacked out materialized views---or found someone who could do it for a million bucks, such as some moonlighting Oracle employee.
Moreover, the query doesn't seem to be contrived at all. It's a simple, run of the mill query, applied to a huge database. The Oracle feature which makes the query run fast seems to be an actual real-world advantage, not just some benchmark fodder.