Diamanti blows AWS and Azure away on containerised SQL Server benchmark

Diamanti has published some test results that show its containerised SQL Server performance is much faster and cheaper than running SQL Server in AWS or Azure container instances. It is also faster than using Portworx,

When SQL Server runs in containers on Diamanti’s software it outperforms the same software running in containers on AWS’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and in the Azure Kubernetes Service (ALS). It also beats Pure Storage’s Portworx Enterprise Storage Platform when that uses the Kubernetes CSI plug-in.

A Diamanti spokesperson boasted: “Diamanti smoked AWS and Azure in SQL Server performance testing.”

The testing used the TPC-H benchmark, which comprises a suite of business oriented ad-hoc queries and concurrent data modifications. The benchmark produces a composite query-per-hour performance metric (QphH@Size), with size being the database scale factor.

Diamanti has released two charts to illustrate performance. Figure 1., below, use a SQL Server scale factor of 100:

The chart compares Diamanti to three different AWS instances and two Azure instances. AWS was consistently faster than Azure’s Ultra instance but also much slower than Azure’s Premium instance. Diamanti was faster than both and also less expensive on the TPC-H 3-year TCO measure.

Diamanti said it scaled up to more than 1 million IOPS, while AWS saturated at 200,000 IOPS, Azure at 192,000 IOPS, and Portworx at 29,000 IOPS. It runs Microsoft SQL Server twenty-five times (25x) faster than Portworx with the same hardware configuration.

A second chart uses a database scale factor of 300 and shows pretty much the same pattern of results, from Diamanti’s point of view.