Two years ago I was at BEA

There have been a couple of events recently which have demonstrated all is not as rosy in the web-based transaction world as the evangelists would have us think. It has been proven beyond a shadow of doubt that while it may be truly whizzy, running any sort of business via a website can be fraught with problems, particularly if you own the kit.

Let

At a time when much of the technology of the infrastructure is, in effect, a `done deal

Is the benchmark for benchmarks that they are no longer worth attempting? The question arises because far less action or brouhaha has occurred in the world of the new TPC-E benchmark than might have been expected. Both Dell and IBM have recently joined Unisys in publishing first results but, strangely, neither has made much fuss about them.

Back in July Unisys became the first server vendor to announce results against the new tests. These set out to simulate the online transaction processing workload of a brokerage firm. This is aimed at giving a much more relevant impression of how a server and database combination will perform in the real world than the old TPC-C benchmark, which while not discredited, has ended up fairly tarnished by rumours and innuendoes about the ways databases and hardware could `tuned