10 ms·

> If we look at major commercial databases today, two out of the three big names in commericial databases forbid publishing benchmarks. I see many people bashi

by whack 9y ago

> If we look at major commercial databases today, two out of the three big names in commericial databases forbid publishing benchmarks. I see many people bashing Oracle/Ellison, but they are not alone in this. MS does the same thing as well. The really worrying thing is that such practices are deemed to be legal. The entire principle of Free Markets is underpinned by consumers having accurate information about the goods they are purchasing. Having licensing agreements that are expressly designed to prevent the dissemination of product-information, goes against everything that Capitalism and Free-Markets stand for. The fact that there are no government regulations against such behavior, is precisely what leads people to think that we are living in a Corporatocracy, and not a Free Market.

__s 9y ago
Ideally consumers care about access to information enough to produce a negative impact on sales for DB engines which don't allow benchmarking, making regulation unnecessary Ideally, ofc
TheIronYuppie 9y ago
I have no objection to your overall sentiment, but, TBH, much of the reason they do this is it is trivially easy to use very authentic looking benchmarks to effectively lie. The net is that the academic ideal of a free market is effectively unachievable in real life - perfect information does not exist. I don't know how to get around this problem of course.
- whack 9y ago
  I agree that we can never get to the ideal of a free market, but at the very least, we can ban business practices that are expressly designed to undermine the free market. We already have anti-trust laws that prohibit companies from some practices, such as price-fixing or false-advertising. We really need to strengthen such laws to ban modern practices such as benchmark-bans.
- userbinator 9y ago
  much of the reason they do this is it is trivially easy to use very authentic looking benchmarks to effectively lie. ...and that is what the companies themselves do for their own products when they show benchmarks, to make them look better than they really are.
- michaelbuckbee 9y ago
  Yes: lies, damn lies and statistics - but I feel like there should be some sort of truth that comes out of the aggregate of these things.
- rosser 9y ago
  So it's only ok for Oracle to lie in their own benchmarks?
- narrator 9y ago
  We can fix the problem of a possibly unfair benchmark with open source. Anyone can inspect the code of the benchmark used, build and run it themselves, criticize it or build an alternative.
- wtallis 9y ago
  > much of the reason they do this is it is trivially easy to use very authentic looking benchmarks to effectively lie Have you ever paid attention to how GPUs are marketed, or the dirty tricks the drivers use under the hood? In spite of this, it's still pretty easy to find out which GPU at a given price point is faster.
diminish 9y ago
It's well known that Oracle and other proprietary databases have special configurations for cheating benchmarks similar to VW emission cheating tricks. Since databases aren't regulated and don't cause health hazards those fake benchmarking configurations don't matter much to people.
- user5994461 9y ago
  You must be confusing with mongodb, the database that doesn't write any data in order to win the benchmark.
- gaius 9y ago
  Yes and I can exclusively reveal what that is, so you can benefit from it as well. Just add the following setting to your initSID.ora make_db_run_faster=true
CalChris 9y ago
> The entire principle of Free Markets is underpinned by consumers having accurate information about the goods they are purchasing. Having licensing agreements that are expressly designed to prevent the dissemination of product-information, goes against everything that Capitalism and Free-Markets stand for. I agree with where you are going but I entirely disagree with your description of Free Markets and Capitalism. free market - an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses There's nothing in there about consumers having accurate information. If anything, caveat emptor. Moreover, if you are a free market entrepreneur then the absolute last thing you want is fairness to your competition or fairness to your consumer. Those are costs of doing business, to be avoided if possible. Naturally, Larry is only trying to avoid them. That's why we have regulation. That's why civilization has evolved to have government. That's why Libertaristan isn't on any maps. That's why The Fountainhead is such a misguided fantasy where entrepreneurs can do anything and it's always better and governments can do nothing and it's always worse. Free Markets and Capitalism don't stand for anything. That's not even a criticism of them either. Civilization might stand for something although that something is a provisional something at best but then that provisional something is better than nothing. The requirement for consumers having accurate information is a government regulation. In the United States, it's enforced by the Consumer Protection Agency. It isn't a free market requirement.
- akira2501 9y ago
  > There's nothing in there about consumers having accurate information. Yes, but practice has taught us that it is an important part of any functioning market. > the absolute last thing you want is fairness to your competition or fairness to your consumer. I completely disagree with your assertion here. I want an advantage over my competition, sure.. but I still want it to be fair. An unfair market is a fickle and unreliable one. That's not good for anyone. Further, if my consumer walks away from the deal feeling that it was unfair then I've really done myself a disservice in the long term. It's a reason why "Goodwill and Brand Awareness" are line items in the world of corporate accounting. > Free Markets and Capitalism don't stand for anything. They stand for the implicit agreement that we are all created equal.
jimmydddd 9y ago
A lot of the problem stems from the fact that many software products use the license legal framework instead of the purchase legal framework. Under current laws, companies have much more downstream control over licensed products than over products that are outright sold.
- mindslight 9y ago
  What I don't get is how these licenses are particularly binding, in that it's only whomever is installing the software that is actually party to the license. After the software installation has been completed, say by some rando from craigslist, the copy residing on disk is constrained by only copyright. It seems like their chilling effect is mostly due to people not wanting to be harassed by legal goons, rather than the concern that the backwards company would actually prevail in court.
HankB99 9y ago
I haven't read the EULA recently but I seem to recall that it was forbidden to publish benchmark results. I don't think there is any rule against performing your own benchmarks. Both Oracle and Microsoft have free evaluation/developer licenses that would allow you to do that. I know it's a lot of work, but anyone whose business is dependant on database performance needs to know how the system will perform with their data and their use cases. I think they would also like to put some effort into working with the database to see how well the associated tools work. It would be nice to have synthetic benchmarks to review as a starting point and I suppose those exist for the open source engines such as Postgres, Maria and MySQL. It should be safe to assume that Oracle and MS-SQL are at least as fast and a little testing should verify that.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cmurf 9y ago
A business is often, maybe even entirely, opposed to free markets and competition. There are numerous transparency and disclosure regulations to inhibit such behavior. I'd put this in the category of fraud: deception intending to result in financial gain. The problem is politics, in particular the Republican variety, is too forgiving, or even servile, when it comes to accommodating big business fraud under the auspice that all regulation is bad, and it is regulations that inhibit free market behavior, rather than encourage it. Strong anti-fraud and competition (anti-trust) laws are absolutely necessary to have something even crudely approximating a free market.
Houshalter 9y ago
Why does this need to be regulated? Why would anyone buy software with such an obviously malicious contract like that? I think the problem is we've put up with EULAs for too long. No one would agree to sign a 50 page document when purchasing almost any other product.
- adamlett 9y ago
  Because almost nobody who buys an Oracle license do so with the intention to run and publish these benchmarks. In other words, the EULA doesn’t affect how the vast majority of Oracle’s customers intend to use the software, and so they don’t feel it impacts them. Of course it actually does, because they might not have chosen Oracle, if they’d had access to accurate benchmarks when they made the buying decision, and maybe the fact that the EULA prevented such benchmarks from being published should have been a red flag. And maybe it would have been if Oracle was alone in this practice, but as the article states, it’s close to the standard practice in the industry.
  - Houshalter 9y ago
    >Because almost nobody who buys an Oracle license do so with the intention to run and publish these benchmarks. Obviously, but it's still a huge red flag, as you note yourself. Would people buy any other product if it came with a big disclaimer that you couldn't review it? I can't think of anywhere else that is done. >And maybe it would have been if Oracle was alone in this practice, but as the article states, it’s close to the standard practice in the industry. Well it had to have started somewhere.
jgalt212 9y ago
> The fact that there are no government regulations against such behavior, is precisely what leads people to think that we are living in a Corporatocracy, and not a Free Market. Amen, brother. Many folks who criticize capitalism don't actually realize that actual bogeyman is cronyism, not the free market.
marcoperaza 9y ago
>The really worrying thing is that such practices are deemed to be legal. What is your basis for this claim? Are you aware of a single successful lawsuit on the basis of a clause like this? If not, you can't claim that it's "deemed to be legal", since only a court can do such deeming.
nradov 9y ago
If you have enough load to make database performance an important issue then it's easy enough to benchmark SQL Server and Oracle (or any other database). Just purchase a regular license and run a performance test on your own application. Those vendor license restrictions on publishing benchmarks are annoying but realistically the minor performance differences on typical workloads don't matter to most customers and the customers who actually care have the technical sophistication to figure it out for themselves.
regulation_d 9y ago
The starting point of basic contract law is that we can choose what we want the terms of a contract to be. If either party doesn't like the terms of a proposed contract, they can just not execute that contract. If you don't want to agree to the Oracle license then don't agree to the Oracle license. It's pretty simple. The market will react to this. Oracle is still really popular, but open source databases are cutting into the market. To me, that sounds like the free market in action.
PeCaN 9y ago
To be fair, there is still TPC, so you can get some idea from that. Given that MS typically does very well on TPC I kinda wonder why they forbid publishing benchmarks. Anecdotally it's very fast as well. Disclosure: I work for a company that uses SQL Server extensively. I quite like it, actually. Easily my favorite Microsoft product and one of my favorite commercial software products in general.

by whack 9y ago

__s 9y ago

Ideally consumers care about access to information enough to produce a negative impact on sales for DB engines which don't allow benchmarking, making regulation unnecessary Ideally, ofc

TheIronYuppie 9y ago

I have no objection to your overall sentiment, but, TBH, much of the reason they do this is it is trivially easy to use very authentic looking benchmarks to effectively lie. The net is that the academic ideal of a free market is effectively unachievable in real life - perfect information does not exist. I don't know how to get around this problem of course.

whack 9y ago
I agree that we can never get to the ideal of a free market, but at the very least, we can ban business practices that are expressly designed to undermine the free market. We already have anti-trust laws that prohibit companies from some practices, such as price-fixing or false-advertising. We really need to strengthen such laws to ban modern practices such as benchmark-bans.
userbinator 9y ago
much of the reason they do this is it is trivially easy to use very authentic looking benchmarks to effectively lie. ...and that is what the companies themselves do for their own products when they show benchmarks, to make them look better than they really are.
michaelbuckbee 9y ago
Yes: lies, damn lies and statistics - but I feel like there should be some sort of truth that comes out of the aggregate of these things.
rosser 9y ago
So it's only ok for Oracle to lie in their own benchmarks?
narrator 9y ago
We can fix the problem of a possibly unfair benchmark with open source. Anyone can inspect the code of the benchmark used, build and run it themselves, criticize it or build an alternative.
wtallis 9y ago
> much of the reason they do this is it is trivially easy to use very authentic looking benchmarks to effectively lie Have you ever paid attention to how GPUs are marketed, or the dirty tricks the drivers use under the hood? In spite of this, it's still pretty easy to find out which GPU at a given price point is faster.

diminish 9y ago

It's well known that Oracle and other proprietary databases have special configurations for cheating benchmarks similar to VW emission cheating tricks. Since databases aren't regulated and don't cause health hazards those fake benchmarking configurations don't matter much to people.

user5994461 9y ago
You must be confusing with mongodb, the database that doesn't write any data in order to win the benchmark.
gaius 9y ago
Yes and I can exclusively reveal what that is, so you can benefit from it as well. Just add the following setting to your initSID.ora make_db_run_faster=true

CalChris 9y ago

> The entire principle of Free Markets is underpinned by consumers having accurate information about the goods they are purchasing. Having licensing agreements that are expressly designed to prevent the dissemination of product-information, goes against everything that Capitalism and Free-Markets stand for. I agree with where you are going but I entirely disagree with your description of Free Markets and Capitalism. free market - an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses There's nothing in there about consumers having accurate information. If anything, caveat emptor. Moreover, if you are a free market entrepreneur then the absolute last thing you want is fairness to your competition or fairness to your consumer. Those are costs of doing business, to be avoided if possible. Naturally, Larry is only trying to avoid them. That's why we have regulation. That's why civilization has evolved to have government. That's why Libertaristan isn't on any maps. That's why The Fountainhead is such a misguided fantasy where entrepreneurs can do anything and it's always better and governments can do nothing and it's always worse. Free Markets and Capitalism don't stand for anything. That's not even a criticism of them either. Civilization might stand for something although that something is a provisional something at best but then that provisional something is better than nothing. The requirement for consumers having accurate information is a government regulation. In the United States, it's enforced by the Consumer Protection Agency. It isn't a free market requirement.

akira2501 9y ago
> There's nothing in there about consumers having accurate information. Yes, but practice has taught us that it is an important part of any functioning market. > the absolute last thing you want is fairness to your competition or fairness to your consumer. I completely disagree with your assertion here. I want an advantage over my competition, sure.. but I still want it to be fair. An unfair market is a fickle and unreliable one. That's not good for anyone. Further, if my consumer walks away from the deal feeling that it was unfair then I've really done myself a disservice in the long term. It's a reason why "Goodwill and Brand Awareness" are line items in the world of corporate accounting. > Free Markets and Capitalism don't stand for anything. They stand for the implicit agreement that we are all created equal.

jimmydddd 9y ago

A lot of the problem stems from the fact that many software products use the license legal framework instead of the purchase legal framework. Under current laws, companies have much more downstream control over licensed products than over products that are outright sold.

mindslight 9y ago
What I don't get is how these licenses are particularly binding, in that it's only whomever is installing the software that is actually party to the license. After the software installation has been completed, say by some rando from craigslist, the copy residing on disk is constrained by only copyright. It seems like their chilling effect is mostly due to people not wanting to be harassed by legal goons, rather than the concern that the backwards company would actually prevail in court.

HankB99 9y ago

I haven't read the EULA recently but I seem to recall that it was forbidden to publish benchmark results. I don't think there is any rule against performing your own benchmarks. Both Oracle and Microsoft have free evaluation/developer licenses that would allow you to do that. I know it's a lot of work, but anyone whose business is dependant on database performance needs to know how the system will perform with their data and their use cases. I think they would also like to put some effort into working with the database to see how well the associated tools work. It would be nice to have synthetic benchmarks to review as a starting point and I suppose those exist for the open source engines such as Postgres, Maria and MySQL. It should be safe to assume that Oracle and MS-SQL are at least as fast and a little testing should verify that.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

cmurf 9y ago

A business is often, maybe even entirely, opposed to free markets and competition. There are numerous transparency and disclosure regulations to inhibit such behavior. I'd put this in the category of fraud: deception intending to result in financial gain. The problem is politics, in particular the Republican variety, is too forgiving, or even servile, when it comes to accommodating big business fraud under the auspice that all regulation is bad, and it is regulations that inhibit free market behavior, rather than encourage it. Strong anti-fraud and competition (anti-trust) laws are absolutely necessary to have something even crudely approximating a free market.

Houshalter 9y ago

Why does this need to be regulated? Why would anyone buy software with such an obviously malicious contract like that? I think the problem is we've put up with EULAs for too long. No one would agree to sign a 50 page document when purchasing almost any other product.

adamlett 9y ago
Because almost nobody who buys an Oracle license do so with the intention to run and publish these benchmarks. In other words, the EULA doesn’t affect how the vast majority of Oracle’s customers intend to use the software, and so they don’t feel it impacts them. Of course it actually does, because they might not have chosen Oracle, if they’d had access to accurate benchmarks when they made the buying decision, and maybe the fact that the EULA prevented such benchmarks from being published should have been a red flag. And maybe it would have been if Oracle was alone in this practice, but as the article states, it’s close to the standard practice in the industry.
- Houshalter 9y ago
  >Because almost nobody who buys an Oracle license do so with the intention to run and publish these benchmarks. Obviously, but it's still a huge red flag, as you note yourself. Would people buy any other product if it came with a big disclaimer that you couldn't review it? I can't think of anywhere else that is done. >And maybe it would have been if Oracle was alone in this practice, but as the article states, it’s close to the standard practice in the industry. Well it had to have started somewhere.

jgalt212 9y ago

> The fact that there are no government regulations against such behavior, is precisely what leads people to think that we are living in a Corporatocracy, and not a Free Market. Amen, brother. Many folks who criticize capitalism don't actually realize that actual bogeyman is cronyism, not the free market.

marcoperaza 9y ago

>The really worrying thing is that such practices are deemed to be legal. What is your basis for this claim? Are you aware of a single successful lawsuit on the basis of a clause like this? If not, you can't claim that it's "deemed to be legal", since only a court can do such deeming.

nradov 9y ago

If you have enough load to make database performance an important issue then it's easy enough to benchmark SQL Server and Oracle (or any other database). Just purchase a regular license and run a performance test on your own application. Those vendor license restrictions on publishing benchmarks are annoying but realistically the minor performance differences on typical workloads don't matter to most customers and the customers who actually care have the technical sophistication to figure it out for themselves.

regulation_d 9y ago

The starting point of basic contract law is that we can choose what we want the terms of a contract to be. If either party doesn't like the terms of a proposed contract, they can just not execute that contract. If you don't want to agree to the Oracle license then don't agree to the Oracle license. It's pretty simple. The market will react to this. Oracle is still really popular, but open source databases are cutting into the market. To me, that sounds like the free market in action.

PeCaN 9y ago

To be fair, there is still TPC, so you can get some idea from that. Given that MS typically does very well on TPC I kinda wonder why they forbid publishing benchmarks. Anecdotally it's very fast as well. Disclosure: I work for a company that uses SQL Server extensively. I quite like it, actually. Easily my favorite Microsoft product and one of my favorite commercial software products in general.