Linux has finally made it onto the business map in the area of database benchmarks, helping take the wind out of Microsoft's continued contention that open-source operating systems don't make good business sense.

While benchmark wars are commonplace in the database space, until the latest TPC-H numbers were released Microsoft had come to largely dominate the TPC numbers with a combination of SQL Server 2000 running on Windows 2000 across a variety of hardware platforms.

The Transaction Processing Performance Council released new data this week showing that IBM's upcoming DB2 7.2 release running on Linux 2.4.3 outperforms SQL Server 2000 running on Windows 2000 in the 100GB category.
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Jeff Ressler, lead product manager for Microsoft's SQL Server team said it was "interesting to finally see someone else finally playing in the 100GB category, which we have dominated with no competition for some time."
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"They seem to have decided not to play in the space where customers are actually playing," Ressler said.