COMDEX

IBM CLOBBERS DATABASE COMPETITION IN COMDEX TRIAL

In a head-to-head comparison staged at COMDEX on November 14th, 1995, IBM's recently announced DATABASE 2 (DB2) for NT outperformed Microsoft's SQL/Server 6.0 by a better than 3:1 ratio in an out-of-the-box testing environment. The demo was prepared to also include Oracle 7.1 Workgroup Server, but Oracle was unable to participate due to license restrictions surrounding the disclosure of Oracle results. The performance contest was staged on two sets of standard queries. The first, written by IBM (and including several written by Research), consisted of simple standard SQL business queries that customers might use in their day-to-day business operations. The second set was an industry standard set of 17 queries which are commonly used for benchmarking database performance. Both databases were executing on an IBM P90 processor with 64MB of RAM and 3x1 GB of SCSI hard disk, running under Windows NT 3.51. The configurations were certified by Amy Wohl, a leading IT analyst and consultant. IBM Research participated heavily in this demonstration, including the actual on-stage execution of the trial. The key performance boost to DB2 was delivered by the SQL compiler which was based on Almaden technology and jointly developed by a team from Almaden and SWS for DB2 Client/Server release 2.0.