ParAccel, one of the new analytic DBMS vendors, recently announced some impressive TPC-H benchmark results. A good review of these results can be found on Merv Adrian's blog at this link.

Not everyone agreed with Merv's balanced review. Curt Monash commented that "The TPC-H benchmark is a blight upon the industry." See his blog entry at this link.

This blog entry resulted in some 41 (somewhat heated) responses. At one point Curt made some negative comments about ParAccel's VP of Marketing, Kim Stanick, which in turn led to accusations that his blog entry was influenced by personal feelings.

I have two comments to make about this controversy. The first concerns the TPC-H benchmark and the second is about an increasing lack of social networking etiquette by analysts.

TPC benchmarks have always been controversial. People often argue that that do not represent real life workloads. What this really means is that you mileage may vary. These benchmarks are expensive to run and vendors throw every piece of technology at the benchmark in order to get good results. Some vendors are rumored to have even added special features to their products to improve the results. The upside of the benchmarks is that they are audited and reasonably well documented.

The use of TPC benchmarks has slowed over recent years. This is not only because they are expensive to run, but also because they have less marketing impact than in the past. In general, they have been of more use to hardware vendors because they demonstrate hardware scalability and provide hardware price/performance numbers. Oracle was perhaps an exception here because they liked to run full-page advertisements saying they were the fastest database system in existence.

TPC benchmarks do have some value to both the vendor and the customer. The benefits to the vendor are are increased visibility and credibility. Merv Adrian described this as a "rite of passage." It helps the vendor get on the short list. For the customer these benchmarks show the solution to be credible and scalable. All products work well in PowerPoint, but the TPC benchmarks demonstrate that the solution is more than just vaporware.

I think most customers are knowledgeable enough to realize that the benchmark may not match their own workloads or scale as well in their own environments. This is where the proof of concept (POC) benchmark comes in. The POC enables the customer to evaluate the product using their own workloads.

TPC benchmarks are not perfect, but they do provide some helpful information in the decision making process.

I will address the issue of blog etiquette in a separate blog entry.