Re: Other benchmark than OSDB

Hi,

I received the mail below, responding to some remarks I made here. I
think it's good news.

A

----- Forwarded message from "Timothy D. Witham" <wookie(at)osdl(dot)org> -----

Return-path: <wookie(at)osdl(dot)org>
Envelope-to: andrew(at)libertyrms(dot)info
Subject: Some clarifications on what Mark said
From: "Timothy D. Witham" <wookie(at)osdl(dot)org>
To: andrew(at)libertyrms(dot)info

I'm in Helsinki an my access is a little screwed up
I going to try and be quick on this. Please feel free to post to
the list if you wish as I can't right now. :-(

>On Tue, Sep 17, 2002 at 11:53:05AM -0700, Derek Neighbors wrote:
?\>> Someone needs to check out
>> http://www.osdl.org/projects/performance/osdldbt.html the OSDL
>> benchmarking tool for DBs and get Postgres to work with it and then run
>>> it and publish results or at a mininum use it to help tune performance for
>> Postgres.
>
> I'm afraid that the OSDL benchmark has a (IMNSHO stupid) handicap in
> getting it working and making it a well-respected benchmark:
>
> "While the inspiration for OSDL-DBT-1 is the TPC-W, they are entirely
> different workloads and results obtained should not and cannot be
> compared. Commercial use of results obtained by running OSDL-DBT-1
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> are expressly prohibited."
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
The above is of course wrong. The license as you note below is
Artistic and you can use it how you wish. But you can't use our
hardware to generate the numbers for marketing purposes. Mark
was a little confused on that item.

> So, it's not TPC, you can't compare it to TPC, and if you wanted to
> compete with the TPC using this test, you couldn't do it. What's
> worse, since there's no definition of "commercial use" that I was
> able to find, I'm not sure if it extends to such things as (for
> instance) writing case studies or responses to RFPs. Even stranger
> is that the Sourceforge page says the project is released under the
> Artistic License, which sure doesn't include restrictions on
> commercial use. (Indeed, the point of the open source brand is
> supposedly that it makes free software more appealing to business.
> Oh, well. :-/ )

Let me explain the purpose of the tests. They are to provide
an open source workload so that developers can share performance
information about this type of commercial workload in an open manner.
As you are familiar with TPC rules you can't share that sort of
working information in the open. But there is no such restrictions
on these two workloads. So if you wanted to share information
with the Linux Kernel folks on say, Asynic I/O performance
changes you can by posting to the wider lists.
>
>
>I'm sure my boss would _love_ for me to work on something we
> can't ever use. Sheesh.
>
If you are a marketing guy I guess you could use the numbers
but you wouldn't have anything to compare to. The real purpose
was to create the same type of stresses as a commercial database
benchmark so that the engineering issues could be worked in the
open. Not to create the next marketing benchmark.

Tim

--
Timothy D. Witham <wookie(at)osdl(dot)org>
Open Source Development Lab, Inc.

----- End forwarded message -----

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