Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!oracle!rbradbur From: rbradbur@oracle.UUCP (Robert Bradbury) Newsgroups: comp.databases Subject: Re: ORACLE on the cheap... questions Summary: Corporate expenses and database benchmarks Message-ID: <302@turbo.oracle.UUCP> Date: 20 Jul 88 18:16:12 GMT References: <5165@dasys1.UUCP> <8208@ncoast.UUCP> <178@turbo.oracle.UUCP> <597@hscfvax.harvard.edu> Organization: ORACLE Corporation, Belmont CA, USA Lines: 65 In article <597@hscfvax.harvard.edu>, pavlov@hscfvax.harvard.edu (G.Pavlov) writes: > Actually, the majority of the RDBMS dollars paid to the large vendors is > spent on marketing, no ? In Oracle's case (if I interpreted the last annual > statement sent me), this was in the 70% of total revenue range ??? Sounds > insane, so maybe not. This is an accurate statement. Oracle's R&D expenditures have been running between 13% and 10% of revenues over the last 3 years. Microsoft's were 11% last year. Even semiconductor houses (which one would expect to have to have very high R&D expenditures) rarely get over 25%. Of course given the way annual reports are laid out non-R&D expenditures can only fall into 3 other areas: cost of goods, sales & marketing, general and admin overhead. The cost of goods is very low in the software business and general and admin overhead is less than 10% in any company I've looked at. That means that most software companies spend a lot of money on sales and marketing. Of course this isn't all going to pay lawyers. I suspect that Oracle's legal staff is quite a bit smaller than AT&T's UNIX licensing staff (:-)) even though we probably have more contracts to deal with. Part of the "marketing" expense is involved in educating the D.P. community on things like standards (SQL), portability and connectability. It also goes to pay for those great little ads with Oracle F-14's shooting down Ashton Tate biplanes. The "sales" expense goes into maintaining regional offices in most major cities (to provide pre-sales technical support and education centers where you can take a course in how to use the product). Also included are the expenses of all the trade shows (Comdex, UniForum, etc.) I'm amazed myself at how much companies have to spend to promote their products but I think that is a reflection of the world we live in. > > Robert objects to the benchmark summary that I quoted: > > > > This is *EXACTLY* the type of thing I was refering to in my original > > posting. You *fail* to mention the versions which were being compared > > in this benchmark. Oracle, Informix and Ingres have had a history of > > leapfrogging each other in performance benchmarks over the last 5 years. > > ..... You don't mention what operating system the benchmark was performed > > on, what the system configuration was, how much time was spent tuning the > > systems, etc...... > > Yet, rereading Robert's summary of Oracle's benchmark claims, I could not > find any of the above information either. I also have not seen anything to > substantiate "... a history of leapfrogging each other..." Touche. I will have to see what I can come up with to back up these claims. I suspect that the hard numbers I need to back it up are covered by a non-disclosure agreement of some sort. I make the claim based on the fact that the sort/merge/join modifications made to Oracle 5.0 were done specifically to outperform earlier releases of Informix and Ingres which had been improved to outperform Oracle 4.0. One place to start is UNIX Review June '88 pg 4 where a benchmark done on a Sun 3/160 using Oracle version 5.0 and Informix version 2.0 has Oracle doing a select of 1000 rows, a projection of 10000 rows, summed 100 groups and selected 100 groups in less time than Informix could select the first 1000 rows. Now I believe these are all DeWitt queries but I'll have to do some research to be sure. If the Informix guys are on their toes I suspect they have a response to this. -- *** All of the above is my opinion only. Reader's discretion is advised. *** Robert Bradbury 206-784-9474 Oracle Corporation hplabs!oracle!rbradbur