> Actually, I have believed for a very long time that there is
> a very concrete
> way to demonstrate the superiority of the HP3000, IMAGE, and in this
> particular case, QueryCalc, over a very similar RDBMS/SQL mix
> on a UNIX box.
>
> The TPC-D standards, which aren't as commonly quoted or
> measured as are the
> TPC-C, are a set of very standard business reports,
> representative of the
> general kinds of reports that most any business needs to run
> every day. While
> they are specified only for an RDBMS/SQL construct -- and
> thus would have no
> validity outside of that arena -- they can be completely and
> quite easily
> duplicated on an HP3000 using IMAGE and QueryCalc.
>
> Because the particularly odd situation that exists with HP-UX
> and MPE running
> on exactly the same hardware, this is a chance to compare
> apples to apples --
> with NO special modification of any software to the specific
> circumstances.

Back when we were talking about TPC I looked at TPC-D and came to the
opposite conclusion:
"OTOH, TPC-D seems to be a non-starter; it specifically requires SQL queries
(0.1: "....The TPC-D database must be implemented using a commercially
available database management system (DBMS) and the queries executed via an
interface using dynamic SQL."), so you can either
 1) run against Allbase on MPE, thus spending a lot of time, energy, and
money on benchmarking a configuration that almost no one uses, or
 2) run against TurboIMAGE with one of the ODBC drivers, thus incurring some
unspecified amount of additional overhead, not to mention using TurboIMAGE
in a sub-optimal manner."

It's important to realize the differences between -C and -D: -C is a
transaction-processing-oriented benchmark (which is where MPE/IMAGE shines),
where -D was a reporting/analysis benchmark.

I say "was" because the other important thing to realize about TPC-D is that
it no longer exists. It was obsoleted 4/6/99. Its replacements are TPC-H
("Ad Hoc Queries") and TPC-R ("Business Reporting"). The longer descriptions
look like this:

"The TPC-H (Ad-hoc, decision support) benchmark represents decision support
environments where users don't know which queries will be executed against a
database system; hence, the "ad-hoc" label. Pre-knowledge of the queries may
not be used to optimize the DBMS system. Consequently, query execution times
can be very long....The TPC BenchmarkTH (TPC-H) is a decision support
benchmark. It consists of a suite of business oriented ad-hoc queries and
concurrent data modifications. The queries and the data populating the
database have been chosen to have broad industry-wide relevance. This
benchmark illustrates decision support systems that examine large volumes of
data, execute queries with a high degree of complexity, and give answers to
critical business questions."

"The TPC-R (Business Reporting, Decision Support) benchmark represents
decision support environments where users run a standard set of queries
against a database system. In this environment, pre-knowledge of the queries
is assumed and may be used for optimization to run these standard queries
very rapidly....The TPC BenchmarkTR (TPC-R) is a decision support benchmark
similar to TPC-H, but which allows additional optimizations based on advance
knowledge of the queries.  It consists of a suite of business oriented
queries and concurrent data modifications."

Both use database-size specifications similar to TPC-D: minimum size is
about 1GB, increasing in half-decade increments (except that 3GB is skipped)
to 10,000GB. The most popular sizes seem to be 300GB and 1000GB.