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Technology Stocks : Applix is back in action -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kashish King who wrote (2078)	1/7/1998 2:29:00 PM
From: Dr. J	Respond to of 3014

however, you also point out that the overall execution time isn't given. How would that be meaningful to customers using this in an interactive session? Clearly they are focusing on fast response and that's what customers want. Depends. In some situations you want fast initial results (for example, show me the top-ranked salespeople - if I only want the first 5, I can kill the query after I get them - in this case first-results is what matters); in other situations you want fast "all results" (e.g. show me all territories which missed quota on our new product). I don't know whether you can tune TM1 for both questions - but it is rare to be able to do well on both simultaneously. Because they don't report both results, I am guessing they didn't do as well on the all-results test. I agree that "fast response" sounds good in PR; but customers don't buy systems like this (which require an overhaul of the way they do business) on the basis of benchmark claims. Every vendor cherry-picks the best results from a benchmark anyway, so I tend to take the results with a grain of salt. Of far more interest would be what Oracle thinks about Applix. It's a positive for TM1 that Oracle doesn't mention Applix in their benchmark results.

To: Kashish King who wrote (2078)	1/7/1998 6:17:00 PM
From: Sr K	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 3014

The release lost credibility when it included phony percentages like "625% and 2,300% faster". If task A takes 145 seconds and a different method can do it in 20 seconds, would anyone who knows math say it was 625% faster? It's 86.2+% faster. Ditto ... task B takes 480 seconds and a different [Applix] technique/product does it in 20 seconds ... 2,300% faster? It was 95.83+% faster, and that should be enough to stand on its own. Ditto for "a database that was more than 100 times smaller". Something can be 100 times bigger, but a maximum approaching 100% or 1 times smaller. In this case if the numbers are valid, the database was 99% smaller. Same logic applies to "more than 300 times smaller".