BM Seer

BM Seer: "'And the good news is that about 40-70% of the stuff we do in performance tuning actually ends up helping end users.'
This means that 30% to 60% of IBM's TPC-C tunings don't help users.
Really beyond the huge disk size of the large TPC-C results (which has a lot to do with the TPC-C being 14 years old), the quote below points to tuning that is legal but seems a bit too 'tricky' for my taste...
'We get down to the level of worrying about the physical column order in the table so the reference columns are near each other, minimizing cache misses during fetching. This is feasible in the TPC-C benchmark because there are only five tables and only ten to fifteen columns in each table. In a more realistic application, where there are many more queries to be considered, the tables are typically much, much wider, in the 80 to 100 column range; and there are dozens if not thousands of tables. Then this kind of analysis is no longer practical.' Bruce Linsay, IBM fellow' "