Re: perfromance world records

On 2/24/07, Tomi N/A <hefest(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> That's the kind of leverage I'd like to have when talking about using
> pgsql with my colleagues.
> Anyone care to comment?

The name brand test are basically paid pr for the big databases.
Basically, the tests are in environments controlled completely by the
vendor. Like almost everything else in the commercial database world,
the major point is to distract and confuse people and not provide any
substantive information.

Some people who follow graphics card developments might remember how
both ATI and nVidia caught a lot of heat by optimizing their drivers
for specific benchmarks to make themselves look good. In the database
world, this kind of behavior is encouraged and publication of user run
benchmarks is prohibited.

A much more fair benchmark would be to publish the hardware/OS
platform in advance but not the SQL in a benchmark. Only standard SQL
would be used and if any unexpected results come back the test is
considered 'failed' by the database. I don't think such a thing would
ever happen though, but I would expect PostgreSQL to do extremely well
in such a test.

merlin