After reading this item on IBM’s new record setting hardware I took a quick gander at the TPC-C results. It has been probably 12-18 months since I last looked at these. What a different landscape! In the past Microsoft used to dominate the Price/Performance results. Not anymore. Looking at both the peformance results and the price/performance results I can see no clearly dominant company.
Many different system vendors, OS vendors, CPUs and databases are represented. In general it does look like IBM have the upper hand at the moment but that could be fleeting. One very surprising result is the frequency of Microsoft COM+ as the TP monitor. I would have thought the dedicated TP vendors would have had the upper hand. I was especially puzzled to see IBMs top result using Microsoft COM+ in combination with DB2 and AIX! How does that work?