The following is the full text of an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. Each month we make one or more key articles available to non-subscribers.
The accompanying graph summarizes the top results on the Transaction Processing Performance Council's (TPC's) TPC-C benchmark, which simulates transactions in an online transaction processing (OLTP) database (such as an order processing database) for IBM, Oracle, and SQL Server databases. The graph shows absolute performance in transactions per minute (horizontal axis) and performance per thousand dollars of total hardware/software cost (vertical axis). Each vendor's database is represented by multiple points, corresponding to different hardware configurations.
SQL Server 2005 has surpassed its predecessor's best marks in absolute performance, although SQL Server 2000 posts a stronger price-performance measure. (Direct comparisons are difficult because benchmarks were not measured on identical hardware.) In addition, IBM DB2 and Oracle 10g currently hold the top spots in absolute performance on the benchmark.
The data were taken at the TPC site on Sept. 15, 2005. Further details on the benchmarks and current scores are at www.tpc.org.
