Forum OpenACS Q&A: Oracle Million Dollar Challenge

Is there any way to collect the one million dollars with a postgres
database. Would the Oracle guys come in and put their system on 12
disk drives? Three times faster seems like an awful lot.
Collapse
Posted by Li-fan Chen on
Having access to the source isn't a silver bullet, but there must be something you can do. What are some ideas you have in mind that will enable PostgreSQL to be 10 or 20 times faster than it used to be? What kind of application will this tuning be effective for? Will you be writing tools to help people tune PostgreSQL more effectively? Or perhaps rearchitecting the database engine so that it is more easily enhancible? What do you have in mind?
Collapse
Posted by Marshall Trammell,III on
I do not have the expertise to enhance postgresql.
My interest - purely monetary
That's a lot of money.

I find it hard to believe that the solutions from
IBM,SYBASE,CA,MS  etc. are 1/3 as fast as Oracle.
I saw Oracle's ad the other night and thought
it was a rather wreckless challenge.

Is Oracle really over three times faster than Postgres 7.1?
I wonder what Oracle's definition of speed in this context is?

Collapse
Posted by Don Baccus on
When the challenge first came out it was widely viewed as being
defined in a way that in practice meant it was unwinnable.
Collapse
Posted by Malachi Kenney on

Part of the challenge is that you must purchase not only Oracle, but also any and all hardware and consulting services that the Oracle Corporation sees fit to prescribe for you. Even if the challenge is winnable, it seems unlikely that the one million dollar prize will be enough to recoup your costs. It goes without saying, of course, that you will never be compensated for the time and energy you spend. It is a bad idea to look at this "contest" as a way to make a quick million.

In any case, raw speed is hardly the only reason to choose a database.