Bull and Oracle have achieved a record-breaking TPC-H one terabyte data warehousing benchmark that demonstrates best performance on a Windows operating system for a 16 processor system.

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.

Oracle's latest result outperforms in both performance and price, using the same number of identical processors, the recently announced best performing Microsoft SQL Server 2005 TPC-H one-terabyte result for a 16 processor system running on Windows.

Running on a Bull NovaScale 5160, with 16 Intel® Itanium® 2 1.6 GHz processors, Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system and using the Xyratex RS-1600-FC-SBD Storage enclosures, Oracle® Database 10g Release 2 with Oracle Automatic Storage Management achieved a record performance of 15,069/QphH@1000GB. The price-performance ratio was $44.33/QphH@1000 GB.

A feature of Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Automatic Storage Management is a database files system that provides cluster file system and volume manager functionality. Oracle Automatic Storage Management delivers the performance of raw asynchronous I/O with the ease of management of a file system.

Richard Sarwal, vice president of Server Performance at Oracle, described the company as being "proud" to showcase its outstanding performance on Windows, adding: "Oracle has a proven history of fine-tuning its products to perform well and consistently across different platforms, and the fact that Oracle Database 10g runs more effectively and cost-efficiently on Windows than Microsoft SQL Server is a testament to our efforts."

Henri Pfahl, director of the NovaScale business unit of Bull, said: "This benchmark result proves that NovaScale 5160 server running Oracle Database 10g can address very large-scale processing requirements."

More and more companies now have a growing need for decision support systems, and Oracle Database 10g Release 2 on Bull NovaScale 5160 server delivers a measurable competitive edge to their users.

The benchmark is just one of the Oracle Database 10g performance world records, including records of TPC-H benchmarks in the larger scale factor categories of three and ten terabytes. Oracle continues to provide customers with industry-leading capabilities that support the most demanding data warehousing and transaction processing requirements, and as the leading database for production data warehousing, Oracle Database 10g provides a single, integrated database engine for high performing data warehousing functions.