Oracle Claims Savings Over IBMs DB2 IBM Blasts Study

Oracle Tuesday used a report it sponsored to claim that its database not only outperforms rival IBM's DB2 8.2, but saves enterprises as much as $50,000 per database administrator. Not surprisingly, IBM called the survey's impartiality into question.


The numbers Oracle touted came from a head-to-head comparison conducted by the Edison Group, a New York technology analysis consulting firm whose research was supported by the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based database maker.


According to Edison, Oracle Database 10g required nearly a third fewer steps than DB2 to complete the test set of relational database management chores and took administrators 52 percent less time to wrap up day-to-day tasks than DB2. Other findings ranged from database recovery time (where Oracle was judged 58 percent faster) to fine-tuning and tweaking (where Oracle ran through the same chores in 76 percent less time).


Edison concluded that the reduced time spent by Oracle administrators translated into a potential annual costs savings of $50,065 per database administrator over DB2.


"IT administrators increasingly are being asked to shoulder more responsibility, and the productivity gains offered by Oracle Database 10g can significantly reduce the workload," said Barry Cohen, the chief technology officer at Edison Group.


IBM responded quickly.


"Let's just be clear, this was a report that was paid for and issued by Oracle," an IBM spokesperson wrote in a response e-mailed to TechWeb. "How much credibility does that really hold?"


The spokesperson went on to say that IBM is regularly getting former Oracle customers to migrate to DB2 because "we're half the price and easier to use." She cited IBM's performance leadership in the recent TPC-C benchmark results, where a 64-way p5 595 server running DB2 clocked a record speed of over 3 million transactions a second, beating existing honors by more than 2 million transactions per second.


"DB2 8.2 performed nearly three times faster than the highest Oracle and Microsoft results combined," the spokesperson said, "at a fraction of the cost. And we didn't have to pay for those results."