Compaq is first out of the blocks with a barnstorming midrange benchmark for a system running Oracle 9i.

If you've got $13 million to spare - which is a lot for a midrange system, quite frankly - you can get a 32-way AlphaServer GS320 to run 230,533 Benchmark C transactions per minute using Oracle 9i. That works out as $56.62 per transaction. The system clocked 188,000 users, and ran Compaq's Tru64 Unix. (Which was Digital Unix, and OSF/1 before that).

Compaq's configuration also includes 16 PIIIs. The $13 million figure is for the cost of the system over three years. The AlphaServer itself is billed at under half a million dollars, that's a quarter of the cost of licensing Oracle 9i software. As usual in these systems, storage accounts for most of the rest.

By comparison, the Unix systems to beat in the TPC-C Top Ten include a 32way Solaris SPARC Fujitsu system, the PrimePower 2000, which clocks 222,772 TPC-C at $51.40, making it the highest non-clustered performer; an IBM RS/6000 S85 'pServer' clocking 220,807 at $43.30, and an HP 9000 Superdome clocking 197,024 at $53.77 per transaction.

The full, 234 page PDF for the AlphaServer can be found here.

Not everyone likes to measure their hardware against the synthetic TPC-C benchmarks. TPC-C scores have been criticised for mixing clustered and non-clustered results in the same league table, and more importantly, failing to replicate real word application conditions.

But it's an itch no vendor seems to be able to resist scratching. ®