Teradata beats performance of Oracle database by 75%, IBM database by 44% in industry benchmarks

In two data warehousing industry benchmarks published recently, the Teradata database topped Oracle and IBM in both performance and price/performance measures.

In a 3TB benchmark, the newest version of the Teradata database (V2R4.1) beat the performance of Oracle 9i by 75% with superior price/performance. In a similar 1TB benchmark, Teradata performed 44% better than IBM DB2 UDB 7.1, also with superior price/performance.

Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation, which is represented exclusively in South Africa by National Data Systems (NDS), is the only vendor to publish TPC-H benchmarks across multiple volume points with the same hardware platform. The results of both benchmarks taken together show the Teradata database`s perfect linear scalability, which is valuable to companies that expect to grow their business and, along with it, their data requirements.

According to Richard Winter, president of Wintercorp, "Scalability claims are common, but they are rarely backed up with mathematics. In contrast, Teradata`s benchmark results do exhibit `slope of one` linearity, indicating that a balanced increase in system resources results in a proportional increase in throughput over the range measured. This type of scalability is important because it translates into investment protection for users. Teradata also leads the field in production-proven scalability according to our surveys, which once again this year show that many of the largest and most heavily used data warehouses - including the single largest commercial data warehouse in the world - run on Teradata."

TPC-H is a decision-support benchmark developed by the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), an independent benchmark auditing organisation, to measure how well databases perform decision support workloads with multiple, concurrent users submitting complex business queries.

The results of this benchmark confirm that Teradata is the data warehousing performance leader, which is why it is the database of choice for businesses that require both decision support processing power and the ability to grow their database without limiting performance.

"With the TPC benchmarks, one can make an `apples to apples` comparison of the major database vendors, and Teradata comes out on top," said Simon O` Hagan, general manager, Teradata Solutions Group at NDS. "However, data warehouse challenges not addressed by the TPC benchmarks include ad hoc queries, constantly changing queries, data skew, high user concurrency, and schema complexity. Customer-specific benchmarks are the ultimate indicators of how a customer`s own application will actually perform on a given platform. And the tougher they are, the better because Teradata has consistently proven even higher performance levels over Oracle and IBM in these more demanding real-world benchmarks."