Remember that ad Oracle ran a few weeks ago on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and later on the back cover of the Economist and repeated on its web site claiming "Sun + Oracle is Faster" than IBM?

Oracle's claim for an undefined Oracle-Sun box was supposedly based on TPC-C results that it promised would be disclosed at Oracle OpenWorld October 14.

It claimed its widget was superior to a published IBM benchmark of six million TPC-C transactions and chortled that "We'll reveal the benchmark numbers that prove that even IBM DB2 running on IBM's fastest hardware can't match the speed and performance of Oracle Database on Sun systems."

Well, IBM complained to the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC).

And, as it turns out, according to the TPC, Oracle doesn't have its claimed TPC results in hand.

It says, "Oracle has not submitted any current evidence to the TPC to sustain this claimed result. Oracle has been directed to cease publication of the advertisement in print or online."

See, the TPC requires that claims based on TPC benchmarks must be demonstrable using publicly available data from official TPC benchmark results. Oracle may actually have the benchmark but it hasn't been audited.

So the TPC has fined Oracle $10,000 for violating its fair use rules, which must have IBM smirking.

The slap-down letter the TPC sent Oracle is here.