I guess I shouldn't be surprised that when a database company swallows a CPU hardware division that the CPU might sprout some more database specific operations, but I was.
I would love to see some benchmarks of how much this speeds up some sample workload queries, if you happen to know of some (preferably not from Oracle's marketing dept.)?
Why am I not surprised by this. I sometimes find myself thinking I should check my bias against Oracle, just to make sure I'm not being too hard on them for past transgressions (for example, Microsoft is far from perfect but they've come a long ways from many of their more negative past practices). Then I learn something like this, which while it doesn't directly mean they are still continuing in predatory marketing and sales practices, doesn't exactly assuage any fears I might have have had.
I currently work for a company that heavily uses Oracle technology. It's horrible. Our culmative contracts are worth several hundred thousand dollars per years.
But they'll still cheat us on small things. We request information on a training seminar (we had a free attendance voucher), and they lose our account information until 1 week after the seminar ended.
It's to the point where I just laugh. Everyone knows their cheating us, but upper management won't change.
Yes if you shell out for all the money to run it on every core, and use a lot memory it is solid. But the bang for your buck, Microsoft SQL has a better support plan, and saner licensing model. My experience is working with smaller datasets <200GB so YMMV.
I mean I'd rather use Postgres. But large corps like having a vendor to call.
Check out EnterpriseDB. I don't know how good they are in practice. But their speciality is solving the exact problem you mentioned with Oracle vs Postgres.
I would love to see some benchmarks of how much this speeds up some sample workload queries, if you happen to know of some (preferably not from Oracle's marketing dept.)?