Performance, Benchmark for Oracle XE

Question

My buisness would like to use Oracle XE as a starter base installation for customers, so that they can easly upgrade to an full Oracle SE or EE later. However I fail to find benchmark tests (like tpc.org) which give an image of the performance of the Oracle XE and how it compares to other databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL in the smaller application market segment that XE is targeting.
We have been running som tests in house, but the currently I must say they are not in the Oracle XE favour. This is disapointing, as we would want to avoid for our customers to start of with a DB other than Oracle, then do an transistion to Oracle SE or EE when the need is there.
We are working on tuning/optimizing the database to perform better. Nevertheless it would be really interesting to see some benchmarks / comparison of the performance between Oracle XE an other DBMS in this segment of the DB market. Beeing well aware that their is not necessarely one database that fits each application/segment best, such a test would be informative. And also great input for my company when choosing which DB to use. Does anyone have any experience on this subject any feedback is highly appreciated. If anyone is interested I would be glad to post details regarding our tesing in house.
Cheers

Answer 1

Hi,
Thanks for the reply. Being well aware of the complexity of optimizing application performance I am simply trying to find as many inputs as possible to make a decision. A benchmark test would for me not yield "the truth" in any way, but simply be another parameter to consider. I am also aware that Oracle DB has several features that other DBs don't have.
You hit the nail on you assumption:
2) use only the very basic features of both DBsThis is correct. We are using a EJB3.0 (Hibernate) environment togheter with JBOSS 4.0.5 application server, using no specific DB implementation. I realize that at some point, to acheive max performance, one should would have to implement code optimized for a specific DB. But right now I am interested in maximizing the performance with no specific DB code. We started out using Oracle XE, and it was doing well. We than switched to Mysql mainly for curiousity, and the performance was much better "out-of-the-box". ( x 2,5!) using less CPU -20%) an memory than Oracle XE. This was a suprising result for me, and now I would like to know why.
If the reason is that Oracle uses more resource for background processes like gathering statistics etc. this is a feasable explanation. Also in a larger system, if these processes take more or less the same resources, they would make out a smaller part of the total available resources. Right now I can't explain the performance gap, I simply observe the test results but cannot explain them.
As my demands to the DB features are limited (basic ER datatypes, incremental backup), is there perhaps a way to "disable advanced features" of Oracle XE, so that more CPU power is available to the application?
Also, how well does the JBOSS app. server integrate with the Oracle DB? Would the Oracle XE perform better with an Oracle App.server?
My application has a typical web-app, having mainly read queries with a high peak load (burst). I have tried tuning the connection pool etc. but no improvment. It is quite possible that I have reached the limit of performance of the Oracle XE, perhaps I am trying to use it for something it was not intended for? Having said this I would prefer to continue using Oracle XE, but it would be nice to know the reasons for the difference in performance.
Any feedback is highly appreciated.