Sun Microsystems Inc’s new Ultra Enterprise servers won a ringing endorsement from Oracle Corp chief executive Larry Ellison, who described Sun servers as his company’sprimary development system, and the base development system for future products, including Oracle8, as well as the reference system for new versions of Oracle Universal Server, the latest database release. It did its first TPC-D decision support benchmark on a Sun server. It has not done TPC-D until now, Ellison said, because of competition from NCR Corp and IBM Corp. Sun runs its business on Oracle. The next day Ellison turned out to applaud Digital Equipment Corp’s new AlphaServer TruClustering for Unix (which currently works only with Oracle Parallel Server) and the smashing of Tandem Computers Inc’s long-standing TPC-C record. At that bash, DEC and Oracle tried hard to convince the crowd that although Sun is Oracle’s main database development system, it only gets something like a two-week advantage, citing the example of the next-generation Oracle8, beta versions of which will go up on DEC AlphaServers and Sun boxes simultaneously. Oracle, which has a ‘special’ relationship with DEC on high-end database systems, runs its business on AlphaServers, not Sun.
