from Hacker News

DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

by arjunnarayan on 6/2/22, 6:56 PM with 84 comments

• by floren on 6/3/22, 11:07 PM

  You can add Splunk to the list of companies with a similar clause. As a Splunk competitor it makes sales a bit harder initially (we can show our product's numbers, but nothing to compare them against), but if you can convince customers to set up a head-to-head proof-of-concept of their own, well, they tend to figure out why Splunk doesn't want you publishing benchmarks...

• by dwohnitmok on 6/3/22, 9:39 PM

  One of my personal bugbears is the DeWitt Clause for Datomic, especially because knowing the performance profile of Datomic is very important for understanding whether your app will be a good fit for it given some of its peculiarities.

• by andrenotgiant on 6/2/22, 7:09 PM

  Has either the Dewitt clause or the Dewitt Embrace ever resulted in some kind of legal action?

  It seems like more of a threat stance to various partners and ecosystem players than anything else.

• by KronisLV on 6/4/22, 7:24 AM

  > Oracle also inserted a clause in their terms of use that boiled down to the fact that one can’t publish benchmarks without getting an explicit approval from Oracle.

  This feels horrible and would make me look away from any software that has such a clause. Then again, i use very little proprietary software in place and when i don't, it's mostly due to someone else choosing it for a project and me just needing to bite the bullet.

  Though in regards to databases, i'm not sure why you'd fork over the cash and use something proprietary, unless you're trying to get rid of any sort of liability on your own end. Then again, i'm pretty sure that you could also find someone to offer support for your PostgreSQL or MySQL/MariaDB deployment, if you wanted to waste money (or did anything so interesting where such support would be warranted).

  > Some cloud vendors permit you to benchmark their service but require reciprocity: you must make the benchmark reproducible and allow benchmarking of your own service or tool in response.

  This is a bit better in comparison.

  Though licenses in general puzzle me. For example, MongoDB is licensed under SSPL so anyone who offers it as a cloud service would have to open source their entire infrastructure: https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license

  And yet i don't think that Digital Ocean is: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/managed-databases-mong... (or maybe they offer the older non-SSPL version).

  The whole enforcement angle feels like it would probably impact an individual who benchmarks databases instead of reading bunches of legalese more, for example, than it would impact a larger company that could "figure things out".

• by RedShift1 on 6/4/22, 10:05 AM

  Having only cursory experience with Oracle databases (as in install and run some queries and that's it), is there any advantage to them over MariaDB or PostgreSQL? Better development experience, easier to tune or no tuning necessary, anything that makes it worth over the free database servers?

• by tetha on 6/3/22, 8:49 PM

  Interesting. As a SaaS vendor, we do not allow performance testing of the production system. Because, you know, just casually saturating production resources can become very iffy for strange and unexpected reasons. And you will always be able to saturate a system, or a subsystem of the subsystem of the system.

  However, we have provided bigger customers, or customer willing to pay for it, with performance testing environments. We have, however, usually survived into the curiosity phase - "just how much to I have to throw at this thing to break it?".

• by jamesblonde on 6/3/22, 11:33 PM

  Our database RonDB, by Mikael Ronstrom ex MySQL, is Dewitt free and we promise to keep it that way. Even though it is now managed DB in the cloud.

• by Nextgrid on 6/3/22, 8:37 PM

  If you want to benchmark for internal reasons you don't publish the results and nobody knows. If you want to make a service to the community, run your benchmarks, download Tor and publish the results anonymously. I don't see what the big deal is?

  Is this only limited to marketing claims where you post it on your company's website?

• by kstrauser on 6/3/22, 10:04 PM

  Honestly, the presence of that clause screams to me "this app sucks and we'll sue you if you tell anyone how badly". That may not be the case whatsoever, but my first assumption is that they're trying to hide terrible performance.

• by jenny91 on 6/3/22, 8:48 PM

  All the BSL/SSPL ones shouldn't be in an "open source" section. Just change the heading to "source available" or put them with the "vendors".

• by chmod775 on 6/3/22, 8:37 PM

  It would be quite refreshing if we could have a story in which Oracle are the good guys for once.

  I'm sure they are at least purchasing some modern-day 'indulgences' by - for instance - donating food to starving north korean elites?

• by GorillaWarfare on 6/3/22, 10:19 PM

  Could this article comparing DeWitt Clauses be considered benchmarking?