[ Thanks to Henrik Carling for this
link. ]
As reported here yesterday, an SGI machine running Linux and
IBM’s DB2 took top honors in the TPC-H database benchmark recently.
This story provides some background and a brief response from the
head of the Microsoft team, who maintains Linux doesn’t have “a
legacy of accountability like SQL Server or Oracle or DB 2
have…”
Jeff Ressler, lead product manager for Microsoft’s SQL
Server team said it was “interesting to finally see someone else
finally playing in the 100GB category, which we have dominated with
no competition for some time.”While he accepted the results, the tests did not compare “apples
to apples in the sense that the amount of computing horsepower
there is not the same,” Ressler said. “You do have to take into
consideration things like the management requirements around a
cluster of four machines versus a single machine.”Ressler also downplayed the Linux role in the benchmark, saying
it was important also to remember that this was a database test and
not an operating system evaluation. While benchmarks are important
as customers look at them as a validation that a product will
perform and scale, the real validation comes from experience in the
field with running mission-critical systems, he said.