An Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel team has achieved a new world record for database performance, according to an industry scorekeeper.

Data published Tuesday by the Transaction Processing Performance Council indicates that a version of Oracle's 10g R2 database running on an HP Superdome server, powered by Intel Itanium 2 processors, has achieved benchmark performance of 4,092,799 transactions per minute.

The performance relegates IBM to second place, which had previously claimed the number one spot with a version of its DB2 database running on an IBM p5 595 server at 4,033,378 transactions per minute. For those keeping score, the Oracle/Intel/HP system is 1.5% faster than the IBM system.

IBM also holds the third and fourth spots in the TPC-C rankings, with Fujitsu rounding out the top five with a Primequest 540 server running Oracle's 10g database. That combination achieved the relatively pokey performance of 1,238,579 transactions per minute.

The only system running Microsoft's SQL server to appear in the TPC-C top ten is an HP Itanium-based Superdome running SQL Server 2005, SP1. It finished in sixth place with a performance of 1,231,433 transactions per minute.