Oracle TPC-H

In Part I of this series about Oracle OLTP/ERP on Exadata versus non-Exadata, I took a moment to point out the inaccuracies of a particular piece of Oracle marketing literature. In a piece aimed at chronicling Oracle Corporation history, the marketing department went way out of line by making the following claim regarding Exadata:

[...] wins benchmarks against key competitors [..]

On 30 November, 2011 Oracle published the second result in a recent series of TPC-H benchmarks. The prior result was a 1000GB scale result with a single SPARC T4-4 connected to 4 Sun Storage F5100 Flash Arrays configured as direct attached storage (DAS).  We can ascertain the DAS aspect by reading the disclosure report where we see there were 16 SAS host bus adaptors in the T4-4. As an aside, I’d like to point out that the F5100 is “headless” which means in order to provision Real Application Clusters storage one must “front” the device with a protocol head (e.g., COMSTAR) such as Oracle does when running TPC-C with the SPARC SuperCluster.