I’m working with our product team to develop a novel idea – and need feedback from you, our customer base. So here comes what may seem like a silly question: How would you like to win a free copy of the Toad DBA Suite for Oracle?
 

Let me explain. I’m proposing that we sponsor an Oracle database tuning challenge. The rules would be rather simple: Using the Toad DBA Suite for Oracle’s  many screens, wizards, utilities and bundled offerings, entrants must email in their optimized database performance results as measured by the competition’s Benchmark Factory predefined project, and a brief write-up of the steps used to achieve those results. We’d then select the winner based upon inspection and analysis of that info. The winner would receive the following:

The competition test database would be delivered as a VMware image with CentOS 4.5 Linux and Oracle 10g Xpress – both of which are free. The zipped up image file would be around a one GB download. The database and operating system would be highly sub-optimized. The idea would be to use the Toad DBA Suite for Oracle to obtain the highest transactions per second and average lowest response time using Toad. And if you’re not currently a Toad customer, you could use the free trial download to participate.
 

The only challenge for me will to build a Benchmark Factory project that scales the results based upon the hardware it’s utilized against. If nothing else, I could always just simply reply each entrant’s results on a standardized configuration for verification. Either way, I think the idea is technically feasible.