February 2002 eWeek Benchmarks

In a February 2002 database benchmark test performed by Ziff Davis Media Inc., the company behind PC Magazine, eWeek and other well-known publications, the MySQL database server stands out as a winner. The MySQL server is presented as having the overall best performance and scalability along with Oracle9i. Also, the MySQL server excelled in stability, ease of tuning and connectivity.

Throughput is in returned Web pages per second from the application server. Number of users is number of concurrent Webclients driving the load. Response time is the time to complete the six bookstore user action sequences, weighted by frequency of each sequence in the mix. All tests were conducted on an HP NetServer LT6000r with four 700MHz Xeon CPUs, 2GB of RAM, a Gigabit Ethernet Intel Corp.Pro/1000F Server Adapter and 249.1GB Ultra3 SCSI hard drives used for database storage.

Some quotes from the eWeek article, "Server Databases Clash":

"Of the five databases we tested, only Oracle9i and MySQL were able to run our Nile application as originally written for 8 hours without problems."

"The Oracle and MySQL drivers had the best combination of a complete JDBC feature set and stability."

"SQL Server and MySQL were the easiest to tune, and Oracle9i was the most difficult because it has so many separate memory caches that can be adjusted."

The databases tested were: IBM DB2 7.2, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, MySQL-Max 4.0.1, Oracle 9i 9.0.1.1.1 and Sybase ASE 12.5.0.1.

You can read more about the benchmark test and view graphs of the test results.