Oracle Achieves Record TPC-C Benchmark

It appears that one or two of my previous posts may have inadvertently annoyed some people at Oracle, so I would like to try and make amends today by posting something extremely positive about the company which, lest we forget, made the “world’s first commercial relational database“, backed Linux before it was a commercially viable option and – let’s face it – allowed me to have a career in IT rather than spend my life washing windows.

The positive story I’d like to share is this one:

Oracle Achieves Record TPC-C Benchmark Result on 2 Processor System

You can click through to see the details of the press release, but here is one of the main highlights describing the platform which was used to achieve this great result:

Oracle Database 11g Standard Edition One and Oracle Linux with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2, running on a Cisco UCS™ C240 M3 Rack Server with two Intel® Xeon® E5-2690 2.9 GHz processors achieved 1.6 Million transactions per minute (tpmC) with a price/performance of $0.47/tpmC.

Of course it seems only fair to point out that the server hardware used here was from Cisco rather than Oracle. That’s not a criticism of Oracle in anyway, merely a footnote to show that the glory needs to be shared a little bit. It doesn’t mention the storage either, but I’ll come back to that.

Also, it should be noted that the Oracle press release makes some comparisons with an IBM DB/2 benchmark – a comparison which some at IBM feel is somewhat disingenuous.

Whatever your thoughts on that, if you are like me you probably tend to overlook the marketing and press releases anyway and skip to the technical details, because they tend to be a lot more black and white. So allow me to point you to the executive summary and the full disclosure report both of which are available on the TPC.org website.

One thing you will notice if you dig down into the details is that the storage was actually two of these:

Violin Memory 6616 flash Memory Array

Yep, that’s right – I’m very pleased to say that in order to achieve new record levels of performance for the OLTP-based TPC-C benchmark, Oracle (and Cisco of course) used two Violin Memory flash Memory Arrays. Now that’s the kind of positive news we love to share…