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    Home Development
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    DB Test Pioneer Makes History

    By
    Timothy Dyck
    -
    February 4, 2002
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      Its not often that a standard clause in software license agreements is created because of one person, but thats the history behind the benchmark result gag clause, also known as the DeWitt clause, in many software license agreements.

      In 1982, when relational databases were just getting started, David DeWitt, then an assistant professor (and now chairman and John P. Morgridge professor) at the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, developed one of the first parallel database systems. To see how it worked, he and colleagues Dina Bitton and Carolyn Turbyfill developed the Wisconsin Benchmark, tested a number of databases and published the results. One of those tested was Oracles namesake database, which proved to be a very slow performer.

      I recently spoke with DeWitt, who recalled Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellisons reaction. “Larry Ellison called our department chair and was so angry about the Oracle results, he said, You have to fire this guy,” DeWitt said. “[But] the university wasnt about to fire me for publishing a paper. It was an important first effort—it showed holes in all the systems.

      “Everybody soon inserted this clause saying youre not allowed to publish numbers. IBM still doesnt have it, which says something very positive about IBM.”

      Since then, threats from vendors using license-clause restraints have stifled free speech, prevented open interaction, and blocked the performance and reliability improvements that benchmark tests generate. And as eWeek Labs and others have found, holes are still there, and without public benchmark tests, they are that much harder to learn about and fix.

      Timothy Dyck
      Timothy Dyck is a Senior Analyst with eWEEK Labs. He has been testing and reviewing application server, database and middleware products and technologies for eWEEK since 1996. Prior to joining eWEEK, he worked at the LAN and WAN network operations center for a large telecommunications firm, in operating systems and development tools technical marketing for a large software company and in the IT department at a government agency. He has an honors bachelors degree of mathematics in computer science from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and a masters of arts degree in journalism from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.

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