Re: PostgreSQL x Oracle

On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, Christopher Browne wrote:

> Oops! andrew(at)libertyrms(dot)info (Andrew Sullivan) was seen spray-painting on a wall:
> > On Mon, Feb 10, 2003 at 08:59:14AM -0500, Christopher Browne wrote:
> >> No, the answer is "We don't know which is faster," and it is quite
> >> certain that we /can't/ know with any degree of certainty.
> >>
> >> The licensing arrangements for Oracle (and many similar products) deny
> >> the ability to do performance comparisons.
> >
> > No they don't. The deny the ability to _publish_ the benchmarks. If
> > you have sufficient funds and time, you could do all the benchmarks
> > yourself.
>
> Fair enough.
>
> But the point still stands that the licenses deny the ability to make
> public claims about relative performance.
>
> If you happened to do some benchmarks (on dev6, if it ever gets
> working :-)), then I'd be quite well placed to look at the results,
> but it wouldn't help anybody making public claims about their relative
> peformance.
>

I've got a funny story about this.

One morning as the train was pulling into the station I was unusually awake
enough to see a big advertising hording on the platform showing a bar chart.
One bar was red and large, from the bottom to the top of the chart, it was
labeled Oracle. The second bar was nonexistant and labeled DB2 with a question
mark. The caption on the advert was something like 'Even IBM choose Oracle for
their own servers'. The explicit or implicit, I can't remember which, message
was that they [Oracle] weren't allowed to show DB2's relative performance.

I even took to watching for it and having a little chuckle.

--
Nigel Andrews