Microsoft meets Oracle $1 million challenge

Microsoft Corporation announced last week that it had beaten the "MillionDollar Challenge" offered to it by Oracle Corporation. Oracle CEO LarryEllison, whose company makes a popular line of database servers, promised topay anyone $1 million if they could prove that Microsoft SQL Server wasn'tat least 100 times slower than Oracle. The challenge was based on Oracle'sscore of 71.5 seconds on a standard query benchmark.

Well, Microsoft not only met the challenge, but it actually came in with abetter time than Oracle, with an incredible score of only 1.075 seconds.Microsoft SQL Server group product manager Doug Leland notes that the Oraclesolution used in the test costs over $100 million. Microsoft's solution,which was about 70 times faster, cost less than $500,000.

"On its face the Oracle challenge seemed credible and fair," says Leland."But it was a loaded deck. To put Oracle's offer in any kind of perspective,you had to understand the minutia of benchmark deadlines and databasecreation. All in all, it was a very clever ploy on their part."

Microsoft's solution included a Hewlett Packard NetServer system with four450 MHz Pentium II Xeon processors, 4 GB of RAM, and 560 disk drivesconnected by nine RAID disk array controllers. SQL Server 7.0 EnterpriseEdition, SQL Server OLAP Services, and Windows NT Server 4.0 were thesoftware used.

"The old school of thought was that data warehousing had to be difficult andexpensive to be useful," adds Microsoft's Doug Leland. "What we'vedemonstrated very clearly here is that the innovations of the Microsoftbusiness intelligence platform make it possible to accomplish the samebusiness tasks with equivalent performance to Oracle for a fraction of theprice. That shows tremendous customer value."

Suspiciously, Oracle's offer was quietly pulled on February 22nd.

"Microsoft has had more than three months to respond to the challenge and wehaven't heard a word from them," said Jeremy Burton, vice president ofServer Marketing at Oracle. "This is because SQL Server 7.0 is years behindin data warehousing technology; they have yet to publish a single TPC-Dresult. Any customer considering SQL Server should have serious concernsabout their failure to demonstrate performance in the critical datawarehousing space"