SUN EMERGES AS PLATFORM OF CHOICE.

Sun Microsystems, Inc., Santa Clara, creator of Java software technology, rocketed past NCR/Teradata, IBM and HP as the infrastructure platform for the top two data warehouse implementations in the Number of Rows category, according to the Top Ten Program results from Winter Corporation, a leading consulting service to major corporations, top universities and governments worldwide to help them increase the value of their investments in very large databases (VLDBs), technology and products.

AT&T, through the Daytona data management system and call detail data store, provided all of Sun's highest ranking positions, consisting of two first-place prizes and one second-place in the Decision Support All Platform size categories. In addition, Sun hardware and Solaris software, together with iForce(SM) partners Oracle(R) and Sybase, Inc. increased its number of positions from the last program competing with NCR/Teradata, IBM and HP for top spots, as Sun continues to emerge as a platform of choice for very large decision support implementations, due to its scaling ability. Specifically, Sun solutions are ranked as follows: (Source for this summary: http://www.Wintercorp.com)

*Most Rows/Records measures the total number of rows in all tables in the database. Not long ago, data warehouses with a couple of hundred billion rows were considered large; now the race is on for a trillion rows.

#1 The AT&T call detail data store, with a half-trillion rows, is based on the Sun systems and storage and AT&T's Daytona(TM) data management system.

#2 The Nielsen Media Research database, with a quarter-trillion rows, leverages Sun's Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) Reference Architecture, which is based on the highly scalable analytical engine, Sybase(R) IQ(TM) 12.5

#8 A financial customer with 75 billion rows, uses the Sun EDW Reference Architecture and Sybase IQ technology.

*Normalized Data Volume -- measures the volume of user data managed by the database system:

#1 AT&T's call detail data store with 94.3 terabytes of user data uses Sun servers and storage and AT&T's Daytona data management system.

#9 Cho-Heung Bank, with 12.4 terabytes of user data, is based on Sun's EDW Reference Architecture and Sybase IQ technology.

#10 A financial customer, with 12.3 terabytes of user data, leverages Sun's EDW Reference Architecture and Sybase IQ.

*Database Size based on the total disk storage used for user tables, indices, summaries and aggregates:

#2 AT&T's call detail data store, with 26 terabytes of data, is based on Sun servers and storage, and AT&T's Daytona data management system.

#7 An online marketing customer data warehouse, with 12 terabytes, is based on Sun systems and Oracle Database.

"Winter Corporation's TopTen Program illustrates the architectural successes achieved through our Reference Architecture program and collaboration with such iForce partners as Oracle and Sybase in true business environments," said Steve Campbell, vice president, Enterprise Systems Products at Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Our award-winning database Reference Architectures are proven in best-in-class customer environments to be highly scalable and dependable, while providing Sun/Sybase IQ customers an even greater competitive advantage through open architectural design that leverages superior infrastructure technology."

Sun now holds 8 of the top 30 positions, ahead of IBM, in the All Operating Systems categories, Decision Support usage, for Normalized Data Volume, Number of Rows/Records and Database Size. Sun platforms provide a highly dependable computing environment with reliable, flexible, and high-volume infrastructure, with features such as auto diagnosis and recovery, full hardware redundancy, hot-swap of key components, as well as proven security in the Solaris Operating System. With innovative management features, such as fault-isolated Dynamic System Domains and Sun's N1 "One Touch" Application Provisioning software, Sun helps customers to simplify how they deploy and operate large-scale, mission-critical applications and projects such as server consolidation, mainframe rehosting, high performance computing, decision support and data warehousing. Through its Reference Architecture program, at no additional cost, Sun provides pre-tested, proven server and storage configurations to accelerate implementation. These solutions help customers reduce the time, technical effort and risk involved in selecting the most appropriate hardware and software for applications and workloads.

"The TopTen Program results, combined with the TPC-H benchmarking results announced last summer, prove how well Sun and Sybase work together to provide our customers with an effective business intelligence infrastructure," said Paul Krneta, chief technologist, Sybase IQ. "With the architecture's market-leading price-performance, storage efficiency, scalability, and the low total cost of ownership our customers experience, there's no question as to why our customers' technology achievement is being recognized by the Winter Corporation. The databases our customers maintain are impressive, and we are proud to be linked to their success."

According to Kim Ross, CIO of Nielsen Media Research, the big advantages of the Reference Architecture work, done by Sun and Sybase, is that it provides the advance knowledge that this solution will work. "The proof-of-concept demonstration put together in Sun's iForce Ready Center gave us the ability to see for ourselves how effective the Sybase-Sun solution would be for our company. Reference Architectures are a real boon to IT managers who are considering solutions for a specific business problem."

About the Winter TopTen Program

The TopTen Program is the fifth global campaign conducted by Winter Corp. to identify the world's leading database implementations. The primary objective of the program is to recognize both the database practitioners whose achievements are advancing the boundaries of database size and power as well as the products, platforms and architectures supporting the leading implementations. The 2003 TopTen program identifies leading database implementations based on number of rows/records, normalized data volume, database size and workload.

More information about the Winter Corporation TopTen Program listings is available online at http://www.wintercorp.com/ttw.asp.

More information about Sun Reference Architectures, including the Enterprise Datawarehouse Reference Architecture is available online at http://sun.com/products/architectures-platforms/refarch.

For more information, call 415/294-4368 or visit http://sun.com.