On Mon, 2008-12-01 at 22:51 -0500, justin wrote: > On idiotic benchmark comparisons "Try to carry 500 people from Los > Angeles to Tokyo in an F-15. No? Try to win a dogfight in a 747. No? > But they both fly, so it must be useful to compare them... especially > on the basis of the most simplistic test case you can think of. For > extra points, use *only one* test case. Perhaps this paper can be > described as "comparing an F-15 to a 747 on the basis of required > runway length We used that analogy for comparing database benchmarks as far back as 1989-90 at Teradata. My memory is it was invented to counter claims that DB2 "was faster" after some disastrous initial benchmark results while attempting a straight database migration. The contrast was that the client/server overhead of each request *was* higher, though the parallel database could perform actions much faster when it eventually got started. The original analogy was a comparison of the passenger carrying capacity, since a jet fighter could only carry ~1 person while the airliner could carry 100s, yet the jet fighter could obviously deliver 1 person much faster to a destination. (At the time, the concept of client/server was widely laughed at). Joke -> Threat -> Obvious. That thought led to the development at BA of a system specifically designed to offload large SQL queries from the mainframe DB2 system. BA knew how to judge database systems and use them for what they were good at. (They continued to use TPF also, because of its speed of hash index implementation, amongst other optimisations). -- Simon Riggs www.2ndQuadrant.com PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
