Benchmarks are easily abused, misused, and misinterpreted. E.g., benchmarks looking at some very specific aspect of query performance being extrapolated to more

Benchmarks are easily abused, misused, and misinterpreted. E.g., benchmarks looking at some very specific aspect of query performance being extrapolated to more complex/real-world queries. Also trade-offs are rarely mentioned in benchmark numbers– e.g., great write throughput, at the expense of: ?. It's fun to be cynical about stuff like this, but it's rarely as simple as "Ellison didn't react well to that and decided to forbid benchmarks".