Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

cube.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 93 posts

Re: DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

#51

Post by larkinrichards »

floren wrote: post #43

You can add Splunk to the list of companies with a similar clause. As a Splunk competitor it makes sales a bit harder initially (we can show our product's numbers, but nothing to compare them against), but if you can convince customers to set up a head-to-head proof-of-concept of their own , well, they tend to figure out why Splunk doesn't want you publishing benchmarks...

Can one provide a benchmarking suite that anyone can execute without posting the results of the test? Thus allowing others to run the test themselves easily but not putting you on the hook for the result?

Re: DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

#52

Post by xwolfi »

floren wrote: post #43

You can add Splunk to the list of companies with a similar clause. As a Splunk competitor it makes sales a bit harder initially (we can show our product's numbers, but nothing to compare them against), but if you can convince customers to set up a head-to-head proof-of-concept of their own , well, they tend to figure out why Splunk doesn't want you publishing benchmarks...

Can you give your name ? I'm fighting against our Splunk decommission project because the big boys tell us we can just use ELK, to which we reply that it means months of devs to reproduce Splunk abilities, to which they reply human cost is invisible but license cost is a sore point for the board...

I love Splunk, it works so well after data is ingested so... who are you if you're better?

Re: DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

#53

Post by fragmede »

chmod775 wrote: post #8

It would be quite refreshing if we could have a story in which Oracle are the good guys for once. I'm sure they are at least purchasing some modern-day 'indulgences' by - for instance - donating food to starving north korean elites?

Oracle Virtualbox is pretty good, and free for personal use. They also make patches available for their Oracle Linux kernel - the UEK, and in a better format than RedHat.

Re: DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

#54

Post by fragmede »

somat wrote: post #49
josephcsible wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Oracle ever wants to be the good guys just once, I have an idea for them that's right in their wheelhouse. Step 1: buy grsecurity's kernel hardening patches. Step 2: put said patches in the publicly released UEK source. Step 3: wait for grsecurity to refuse to give them future patches. Step 4: sue grsecurity for imposing further restrictions on the exercise of rights granted by the GPL.

I think the weakness of your model is just because you have the right to distribute a certain patch level that does not mean you automatically have the right to distribute further patches, Conversely, If the right to distribute is revoked, say a GPL to closed source license change you have still the right to distribute any versions originally distributed under the open license. A good example off all this is the sord…

Exactly right - you can get the GPL source for v1.0 which you've bought and paid for access to the binaries, but there's nothing that says they have to sell you binaries for v1.1, and thus you don't have any right to v1.1's source, despite it being GPL.

Re: DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

#55

Post by jeroenhd »

Beltalowda wrote: post #35
jeroenhd wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They try to be the good guy. Their free tier is quite extensive (24GB of RAM, 4 ARM vCPUs and ±2 AMD cores, a several hundred GB of storage), good enough to run quite a decent personal cluster on, probably to lure in businesses for their AWS-style cloud services which are as ridiculously expensive as their competition. However, just like AWS, Azure, and GCloud, their admin UI is complicated, slow, frustrating and ful…

I've read various stories over the years about Oracle extremely aggressively pushing high bills because they think you're using the "free" version of MySQL or VirtualBox in a way that you're supposed to pay for it. I'd be very wary running anything "free" from Oracle (as in: I wouldn't).

I had the same worries, but my Oracle account literally can't access any paid services. In fact, it's so bad that when your trial expires (you get some tryout credit) I couldn't even pay to continue operating if I wanted to, the resources had to be recreated from scratch!

Re: DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

#56

Post by floren »

xwolfi wrote: post #52
floren wrote: post #43

You can add Splunk to the list of companies with a similar clause. As a Splunk competitor it makes sales a bit harder initially (we can show our product's numbers, but nothing to compare them against), but if you can convince customers to set up a head-to-head proof-of-concept of their own , well, they tend to figure out why Splunk doesn't want you publishing benchmarks...

Can you give your name ? I'm fighting against our Splunk decommission project because the big boys tell us we can just use ELK, to which we reply that it means months of devs to reproduce Splunk abilities, to which they reply human cost is invisible but license cost is a sore point for the board... I love Splunk, it works so well after data is ingested so... who are you if you're better?

It's Gravwell (gravwell.io). Depending on exactly what you're doing in Splunk, it could be a pretty easy transition, and we've even started writing tools to migrate data out of Splunk and into Gravwell. We've got a free 14GB/day community license if you'd like to play with it on your own, or you can email sales for a POC.

Re: DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

#57

Post by floren »

larkinrichards wrote: post #51
floren wrote: post #43

You can add Splunk to the list of companies with a similar clause. As a Splunk competitor it makes sales a bit harder initially (we can show our product's numbers, but nothing to compare them against), but if you can convince customers to set up a head-to-head proof-of-concept of their own , well, they tend to figure out why Splunk doesn't want you publishing benchmarks...

Can one provide a benchmarking suite that anyone can execute without posting the results of the test? Thus allowing others to run the test themselves easily but not putting you on the hook for the result?

As I understand it you can give instructions and probably even build tools to do the benchmarking, it's just that when the Splunk customer runs those tools, they are forbidden to share the results with you or anyone else.

Re: DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

#58

Post by mappu »

josephcsible wrote: post #17
chmod775 wrote: post #8

It would be quite refreshing if we could have a story in which Oracle are the good guys for once. I'm sure they are at least purchasing some modern-day 'indulgences' by - for instance - donating food to starving north korean elites?

If Oracle ever wants to be the good guys just once, I have an idea for them that's right in their wheelhouse. Step 1: buy grsecurity's kernel hardening patches. Step 2: put said patches in the publicly released UEK source. Step 3: wait for grsecurity to refuse to give them future patches. Step 4: sue grsecurity for imposing further restrictions on the exercise of rights granted by the GPL.

Matthew Ruffell was keeping the last open grsecurity patchset alive as part of Dapper Linux, but it's stuck on 4.9 and never managed to get a bootable 4.13 port.

Another good thing Oracle could do, is to release a CDDL update that is GPL-compatible.

Re: DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

#59

Post by hyperhopper »

igorlukanin wrote: post #18
Nextgrid wrote: post #7

If you want to benchmark for internal reasons you don't publish the results and nobody knows. If you want to make a service to the community, run your benchmarks, download Tor and publish the results anonymously. I don't see what the big deal is? Is this only limited to marketing claims where you post it on your company's website?

How likely is it that one takes an anonymous benchmark published by a noname researcher seriously?

Ah the same level as if it were from an acclaimed researcher: not only did they do the work, they also risked breaking the law to disclose it.

This isn't line the traditional case of no name vs trusted name: due to the law you _must_ br anonymous to post this, so anonymity isn't a red flag, it's the standard.

Re: DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

#60

Post by hyperhopper »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #48
kstrauser wrote: post #27

Honestly, the presence of that clause screams to me "this app sucks and we'll sue you if you tell anyone how badly". That may not be the case whatsoever, but my first assumption is that they're trying to hide terrible performance.

While I would prefer if this clause was not a thing, I also understand why it exists even for great products. It is surprisingly difficult to reproduce many workload benchmarks and quite easy to engineer a benchmark that misrepresents real-world database performance. There are tools that exist to generate optimally pathological workloads that target specific database implementations, while looking completely reasonab…

I don't think this is a reasonable argument: bad faith stats and data manipulation exists in literally everything.

We should all be free to express our thoughts and backing data, and participate freely in the marketplace of ideas.

No corporation should be able to put gag orders on people especially when they are biased and have good reasons to want to control the discourse

Post reply on HN