Oracle Corp and Digital Equipment Corp yesterday reaffirmed their three-year old alliance on VLM 64 very large memory database technology, delivering a leading TPC-C performance of 102,541 tpmC or $139 per tpmC, nearly double the nearest competitor. The TPC-C benchmark – which measures transaction performance – was achieved running Oracle8 on a cluster of eight twelve-way 625MHz 21164-based AlphaServer 8400 5/625 systems with 18Tb of disk from DEC’s StorageWorks division. The amount of RAM – surely the most crucial point in such a benchmark – was not specified, and the result had yet to be posted to the Transaction Processing Council, something that’s supposed to happen within 24 hours of announcement. Insiders expect TPC-C performance to increase significantly when systems using DEC’s EV6 21264 chip and the database-in-RAM technology are benchmarked. While Oracle CEO Larry Ellison expects it will be two or three years before a Windows NT system can achieve the same level of absolute performance, Compaq’s Eckhard Pfeiffer – whose company is in the process of swallowing DEC – claimed his company would do 100,000 tpm on NT before the end of next year. Meanwhile Sequent Computer Systems Inc says its NUMA-Q 2000 data center server is the first Intel platform to support Oracle8’s VLM Extended Cache capabilities, and can manage large buffer caches within the 64Gb range.
