INDUSTRY

Oracle announced a new world record TPC-H 10TB data warehousing benchmark result for Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Real Application Clusters running HP-UX 11i v2 on two HP Integrity Superdome servers. This highlights the scalability and cost leadership of Oracle Database 10g and HP Integrity Superdome servers by outperforming IBM DB2's best TPC-H 10 TB result using 20 percent fewer processors, while offering more than 33 percent better price/performance. Furthermore, the benchmark demonstrates the single processor performance superiority of the Integrity servers with the Itanium 2 processor by outperforming the IBM Power processor by 73 percent. Data warehouse performance is a requirement in today's fast moving global markets. Robust, highly scalable data warehouses allow executives and data analysts to scour vast repositories of customer and market information with decision support tools to uncover new strategic markets and identify opportunities to streamline costs. Only the most powerful database software and server platforms, such as those from Oracle and HP, are able to examine these large volumes of data, execute queries with a high degree of complexity, and give insight to these critical business questions as demonstrated by today's TPC-H benchmark result. First Trust Corp., one of the nation's largest independent trust companies for self-directed retirement plans, is a joint Oracle-HP customer. "Performance and scalability are critical to First Trust. Our Itanium 2-based HP Integrity servers running Oracle Real Application Clusters exceeded our expectations, delivering a threefold performance improvement over our previous IBM RISC-based system running on AIX, while still driving down our total cost of ownership," said Jeff Knight, vice president of Technology and Vendor Relations at First Trust. "With these benchmark results, HP and Oracle are delivering impressive solutions that provide the best performance per processor and scale to meet the most demanding requirements." Oracle and HP together set the world-record performance of 86,282.7 queries per hour (QphH) @ 10TB at a price-performance ratio of $161/QphH @ 10TB on the independent Transaction Processing Performance Council's TPC-H benchmark. This benchmark result produced 88 percent scalability from one to two-nodes for a 10TB data warehouse. This two-node server cluster represents the industry's first publication of a commercial benchmark using the standards-based InfiniBand technology. The InfiniBand offering from HP, along with 128 Itanium 2 processors running at 1.5 GHz with 6M L3 cache connected to HP StorageWorks XP128 disk arrays contributed to the superior scale-out performance for this benchmark. Previously, HP and Oracle set the world record for the fastest single-system TPC-H 10TB benchmark. The unprecedented performance results of both the single system and two-node cluster show the scale-up and scale-out superiority of the HP and Oracle combination. Based on this and previous achievements, HP and Oracle now hold the world records for both non-clustered and clustered TPC-H results for the 10 and 3TB scale factors. As the leading database for production data warehousing, Oracle Database 10g provides a single, integrated database engine for scalable and high performing data warehousing implementations. "This achievement once again underscores Oracle's ability to satisfy large enterprise data processing needs," said Chuck Rozwat, executive vice president of Development Server Technologies at Oracle Corp. "With Oracle, customers can get world class performance at the best value." "This benchmark demonstrates that HP is committed to offering our customers a business intelligence platform with the greatest power at the best price/performance in the industry," said Rich Marcello, senior vice president and general manager of Business Critical Servers at HP. This benchmark adds to the extensive list of HP and Oracle Database 10g performance world records. HP and Oracle were the first to surpass one million transactions per minute with the TPC-C benchmark by using the HP Integrity Superdome server and the companies currently hold the overall TPC-C world record result of 1.18 million transactions per minute on a Linux cluster of HP Integrity rx5670 servers.