Copying from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12115397/is-it-against-l... : The standard license ( http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/standard-license-... ) you agree to when you download software from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) does state that you're not allowed to disclose benchmarks. You may not: > - disclose results of any program benchmark tests without our prior consent. I sadly suspect that…
Maybe one justified reason is that proper benchmarking can be hard. Especially running fair benchmarks between competing complex products. At some point some big database vendors were showing full-page ads in prominent industry publications comparing database X to Y. This kind of clause in license may make publishing misleading performance figures a bit harder.
I think DB makers should take it as an opportunity to make inroads into developer communities, explaining how to configure and optimise, maybe even work together to create a standard test harness. Rather threatening to bankrupt anyone that talks about their database...