Are iGen benchmarks going to be published comparing Falcon with InnoDB? There might be a negative reaction from part of the MySQL community if that were done without also publishing a spec for the iGen benchmark.

Honestly why I picked up on this is because of the title which says “MySQL Benchmark UltraSPARC T2 beats Xeon on Consolidation of OLTP & Web” – it does not Say Sun Open Source Stack beats Microsoft Stack it speaks about CPUs.

Indeed this is full stack benchmark and what I’m saying it is at large extent pointless because there are so many variables involved. Again I’m speaking from the true technical standpoint.

Regarding the benchmark I hope you understand “mix of simple medium and heavy transactions” does not count as a good benchmark specs. The only onces which allow to repeat benchmark are good.

This benchmark was about open stack vs. Microsoft stack w/virtualization.
It was not meant to be determining specific effects of each part of the
stack. Prix fixe menu vs. ala carte.

Current virtualization/consolidation that many customers are doing combine
a lot more than 6 different workloads and that trend is continuing.
Consolidating more low-utilization workloads together can save a lot more
wattage than many servers running at low utilization.

The iGen workload was created from actual customer workloads and has a lot
more complexity than Sysbench which only test very simple operations one
at a time. The iGen database consist of 6 tables and its executes a combination of light , medium and heavy transactions. The disks was appropriately sized for this workload. We realize that typical MySQL DB boxes may be running lighter workloads that require less disks. Many workloads on Oracle, DB2, and Sybase workloads require a lot more disks.

The $200k was for hardware, disk, Microsoft, and virtualizaiton software,
not just a box.

There are many benchmarks that a UltraSPARC T2 configuration can beat
4-socket quad-core Xeon both on price, performance, price/performance,
watt/performance when you have workloads that need this level of computation. Check this out:

http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t5220/benchmarks.jsp
http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t5120/benchmarks.jsp

While not all customers require Hardware, disk, and software configurations
of this size there are many workloads that require a lot more. It would be
interesting to see how MySQL scales to address these even larger requirements.
It may present a growth area for MySQL.

You can get these servers for free 60 days trial and check them out for consolidation with free Solaris containers technology of Solaris 10. Check this out for more details:
http://www.sun.com/tryandbuy/rules.jsp.

If availability of disk is an issue, maybe you can use another workload like Sysbench instead of iGen