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?

Comments

Microsoft did it in March... sort of...

[jedinite]

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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Re:Microsoft did it in March... sort of...

[jedinite]

Some more info on my previous post, and based upon a quick web search (gotta love NorthernLight):

Microsoft Claims Victory in $1 Million Oracle Bounty

Microsoft's Press Release for that date, which strangely doesn't specifically mention the contest

MS Press Release...scroll thru the usual PR BS to find some "real" data on the benchmark.

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Oracle closed the challenge after > 3 months

[ninjaz]

Here's the press release about it.

"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".

Information showing the challenge was a "set-up"

[Seth Finkelstein]

I have no love for MS, quite the reverse, but see the discussion of the "challenge" in the OLAP Report

This very narrowly focused demonstration was in response to Larry Ellison's million dollar challenge, made at Comdex in mid November 1998, when he offered anyone in the audience $1m if they could run a specific (TPC-D query 5) query better than 100 times slower than Oracle 8i. Ellison's apparently casual challenge was nothing of the sort: Oracle was well aware that SQL Server 7.0 lacked a key feature (materialized views) that would allow it to handle this particular query in the same way that Oracle8i could, so Oracle was not actually risking the humiliation of paying Microsoft a $1m prize.

- Seth Finkelstein

So what?

[Kaz Kylheku]

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.