Over the past few months in several semi-formal occasions, I ran into folks from your well-known vendors (minus Microsoft). Some of the folks were from the vendors’ performance labs and were involved in conducting benchmark tests and publishing benchmark results. So naturally they were very happy and eager to talk about performance, I mean any database performance, until the topic of TPC-E came up. They might not be squirming. But it’s hard to be mistaken that they really didn’t want to talk about it or go anywhere near it, especially not on any sort of record.
That just felt weird!
On one hand, you have this industry standard database OLTP benchmark that all these firms were on board the Transaction Processing Performance Council in its official approval and release in February 2007. And it was supposed to eventually replace TPC-C. On the other hand, for all these years Microsoft has been the only database platform vendor in releasing any TPC-E benchmark results.
It has been four years since the benchmark’s release, and I don’t think everyone can still claim they are evaluating it and trying to work out the wrinkles. So there must be very solid reasons for the other DBMS vendors to not touch it. And yet no one wanted to discuss those reasons publicly. Sure, you hear things through the grapevine. But the silence from the official channels is just deafening!
Or have I missed something really obvious?