REDWOOD SHORES, Calif. and PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 8, 2004 -- Oracle and HP today announced a new world record TPC-H 10 terabyte (TB) data warehousing benchmark result for Oracle(R) Database 10g and Oracle Real Application Clusters running HP-UX 11i v2 on two HP Integrity Superdome servers. This highlights the scalability and cost leadership of Oracle Database 10g and HP Integrity Superdome servers by outperforming IBM DB2's best TPC-H 10 TB result using 20 percent fewer processors, while offering more than 33 percent better price/performance(1). Furthermore, the benchmark demonstrates the single processor performance superiority of the Integrity servers with the Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processor by outperforming the IBM Power processor by 73 percent(1).

Data warehouse performance is a requirement in today's fast moving global markets. Robust, highly scalable data warehouses allow executives and data analysts to scour vast repositories of customer and market information with decision support tools to uncover new strategic markets and identify opportunities to streamline costs. Only the most powerful database software and server platforms, such as those from Oracle and HP, are able to examine these large volumes of data, execute queries with a high degree of complexity, and give insight to these critical business questions as demonstrated by today's TPC-H benchmark result.

First Trust Corp., one of the nation's largest independent trust companies for self-directed retirement plans, is a joint Oracle-HP customer. "Performance and scalability are critical to First Trust. Our Itanium 2-based HP Integrity servers running Oracle Real Application Clusters exceeded our expectations, delivering a threefold performance improvement over our previous IBM RISC-based system running on AIX, while still driving down our total cost of ownership," said Jeff Knight, vice president of Technology and Vendor Relations, First Trust. "With these benchmark results, HP and Oracle are delivering impressive solutions that provide the best performance per processor and scale to meet the most demanding requirements."

Oracle and HP together set the world-record performance of 86,282.7 queries per hour (QphH) @ 10 TB at a price-performance ratio of $161/QphH @ 10 TB on the independent Transaction Processing Performance Council's TPC-H benchmark(1). This benchmark result produced 88 percent scalability from one to two-nodes for a 10 TB data warehouse(2). This two-node server cluster represents the industry's first publication of a commercial benchmark using the standards-based InfiniBand(TM) technology. The InfiniBand offering from HP, along with 128 Itanium 2 processors running at 1.5 GHz with 6M L3 cache connected to HP StorageWorks XP128 disk arrays contributed to the superior scale-out performance for this benchmark. Previously, HP and Oracle set the world record for the fastest single-system TPC-H 10 TB benchmark(3). The unprecedented performance results of both the single system and two-node cluster show the scale-up and scale-out superiority of the HP and Oracle combination. Based on this and previous achievements, HP and Oracle now hold the world records for both non-clustered and clustered TPC-H results for the 10 and 3 TB scale factors.

As the leading database for production data warehousing, Oracle Database 10g provides a single, integrated database engine for scalable and high performing data warehousing implementations. "This achievement once again underscores Oracle's ability to satisfy large enterprise data processing needs," said Chuck Rozwat, executive vice president of Development Server Technologies, Oracle Corp. "With Oracle, customers can get world class performance at the best value."

"This benchmark demonstrates that HP is committed to offering our customers a business intelligence platform with the greatest power at the best price/performance in the industry," said Rich Marcello, senior vice president and general manager of Business Critical Servers, HP.

This benchmark adds to the extensive list of HP and Oracle Database 10g performance world records. HP and Oracle were the first to surpass one million transactions per minute with the TPC-C benchmark by using the HP Integrity Superdome server and the companies currently hold the overall TPC-C world record result of 1.18 million transactions per minute on a Linux cluster of HP Integrity rx5670 servers(4).

About Oracle Database 10g

Oracle Database 10g is designed to be effectively deployed on everything from small blade servers to the biggest SMP servers and clusters of all sizes. It features automated management capabilities for easy, cost-effective operation. Oracle Database 10g's unique ability to manage all data from traditional business information to XML documents and spatial/location information makes it the ideal choice to power Online Transaction Processing, Decision Support and Content Management applications.

About HP Integrity Servers

HP Integrity servers, based on the industry standard Intel Itanium 2 processor, are known for driving unique customer value from their unparalleled flexibility, mission-critical reliability, and highly scalable, industry-leading performance. There is strong market momentum and growing solution ecosystems for Integrity servers due to their capability to successfully solve the most challenging real-world customer problems across broad industry segments.

About TPC-H

TPC-H is a decision support benchmark consisting of a suite of business oriented ad-hoc queries and concurrent data modifications. The performance metric is called the TPC-H Composite Query-per-Hour Performance Metric (QphH@Size) and reflects multiple aspects of the capability of the system to process queries. More information is available at http://www.tpc.org .

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing. For the last four fiscal quarters ended July 31, 2004, HP revenue totaled $78.4 billion. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com.

About Oracle

Oracle is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com . Trademarks

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Intel and Itanium are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Linux is a U.S. registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. InfiniBand is a trademark of the InfiniBand Trade Association.

As of Oct. 7, 2004:

(1) HP Integrity Superdome 2-node Cluster, each with 64 processors, 86,282.7 QphH@10000GB, $161/QphH@10000GB, (674 QphH performance per processor), available 4/6/05. IBM eServer p690 5-node Cluster, each with 32 processors, 62,214.7 QphH@10000GB, $243/QphH@10000GB (389 QphH performance per processor), available 5/15/03.

(2) The HP/Oracle TPC-H 10TB single node result of 49,104.5 QphH@10000GB and the HP/Oracle TPC-H 10TB 2-node result of 86,300 QphH@10000GB were used to determine the scalability factor of 88%.

(3) HP Integrity Superdome, 49,104.5 QphH@10000GB, $118/QphH@10000GB, available 03/25/04. HP Integrity Superdome, 45,247.8 QphH@3000GB, $109/QphH@300GB, available 3/25/04.

(4) HP Integrity rx5670 16-node Cluster, 1,184,893 tpmC, $5.52/tpmC, available 04/30/04

Source: Transaction Processing Council (TPC), http://www.tpc.org

For more information on TPC-H and TPC-C benchmarks, please visit http://www.tpc.org. TPC is a registered trademark by the Transaction Processing Council.

SOURCE Oracle Corp.

Web Site: http://www.oracle.com