Compaq has been ousted from its pole position in the TPC-C transaction processing benchmarks in slightly humiliating fashion.

A spokesperson for the TPC in San Jose told The Register that two Q entries had been disqualified for failing condition 1.6.3 of the benchmark. This is one of the data transparency conditions which states that "general purpose mechanisms" must be supported to access data, without the application needing to know where exactly it is.

It turns out that the fault lies with SQL Server 2000 itself, rather than the great Stan of haircuts.

Both of Q's benchmarks were on ProLiant 8500 series hardware running SQL Server 2000, and were originally passed in February. You can find them here.
IBM grabbed the top Performance TPC-C figure with a DB2 on Netfinity running Windows 2000 on Monday.
®