SQL Server 2005 TPC-H Benchmarks

The graph summarizes the top results on the Transaction Processing Performance Council’s (TPC) TPC-H benchmark, which simulates queries against a large decision support database (such as a data warehouse), for IBM DB2, Oracle 10g, and SQL Server 2005 and 2000. 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.

Although the differing hardware configurations make direct comparisons difficult, SQL Server 2005’s best marks exceed those of its predecessor, both in absolute performance and price-performance measures. Furthermore, SQL Server 2005 shows a slight lead in price-performance compared with its competitors. However, SQL Server 2005 has yet to post benchmarks that rival IBM DB2 and Oracle 10g in absolute performance, a situation that Microsoft will undoubtedly work to address as SQL Server 2005’s ship date approaches.