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Comment by zeroDivisible | Hacker News Reader

What is the policy of Cognitect re: public benchmarks? I did not know that.

> The Licensee hereby agrees, without the prior written consent of Cognitect, which may be withheld or conditioned at Cognitect’s sole discretion, it will not... publicly display or communicate the results of internal performance testing or other benchmarking or performance evaluation of the Software

From the Datomic EULA here: https://www.datomic.com/on-prem-eula.html

That's just vile. is there any /good/ defense of this kind of agreement other than a 'think of the children' argument that people might make a mistake in their performance reviews?

It's annoying, but it's pretty standard in commercial databases: if your competitors refuse to allow public benchmarks, all it can do is hurt you.

How standard is it? As far as I know among databases MS SQL and Oracle do this but do other commercial databases do this as well?

https://danluu.com/anon-benchmark/

It’s common enough to have a name: “DeWitt clause”. It sounds like IBM is the only major commercial rdbms vendor to allow benchmarks?

That article only lists MS and Oracle though. Apart from IBM, I don't think CockroachDB Enterprise has such a prohibition, nor does Google Spanner (I think?), nor does Amazon Aurora (again I think?). And of course all the open source competitors don't have this clause.

Basically my impression is that DeWitt clauses are common enough to be well-known, but still in the distinct minority. That's just an impression though.

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