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Microsoft's Latest Benchmark Fraud

Lie: MS SQL Oracle fake compare



Summary: Microsoft's advertising is still a scam and should be dealt with appropriately

EARLIER THIS MONTH we wrote about Microsoft coming under threat of lawsuits due to these very same practices. The victim of benchmark fraud was IBM at the time and this time it is Oracle.



One of our readers got us a scan of the advert (see above). "It's kinda small," he says, "but you might find it interesting." Here is the benchmark the advert is mentioning. To quote: "New results from SAP show that on similarly configured systems, SQL Server 2000 running on Windows Server 2003 outperformed Oracle 9i running on HP-UX. The highest Fully Processed Line Items Per hour, 178,000, has SAP certification number 2005017, and the highest 4-way Oracle result in this benchmark is 88,670, with SAP certification number 2004030."

“Such benchmark fraud should be reported to the ASA for deceptive marketing.”They neglect to say that MSSQL server is 8 cores, whereas the Oracle server is 4 cores. Oiaohm adds that "HP-UX has the lowest benchmarks with Oracle. Solaris and Linux outscore it. Basically, Microsoft cheats on benchmarks at every chance. [...] Also thinking Oracle also runs on Windows. Benchmark was very incomplete. [...] Also lower clock speed processors."

"It's a really stacked config," adds the person who sent us this information. "Even with it not being HPUX, you are looking at 4 dual-core Opterons versus 4 single-core Itanium2 processors. Quite a big speed difference too."

To conclude, he adds: "The point was to show MSSQL was faster than Oracle. They want you to buy their database, not just the OS. It's just one more effort on Microsoft's part to spin bad data into a convincing glossy blurb to appeal to the C-levels I don't mind if they do a fair comparison and win, but this kind of stuff just hurts their credibility."

Such benchmark fraud should be reported to the ASA for deceptive marketing. This has happened before and the same should be done about "<vendor> recommends Vista" [1, 2] and other marketing schemes, maybe even "it's better with Windows" [1, 2].

Microsoft keeps wondering why it is not liked in IT circles. It is not because "it's a big company."

"Microsoft did sponsor the benchmark testing and the NT server was better tuned than the Linux one. Having said that, I must say that I still trust the Windows NT server would have outperformed the Linux one."

--Windows platform manager, Microsoft South Africa
Reference: Outrage at Microsoft’s independent, yet sponsored NT 4.0/Linux research

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