> I can evaluate the claim now

And the article is now. What luck!

> I would not have been able to evaluate the speed gain of an Oracle database using whatever proprietary implementation they are using.

Which has nothing to do with the article. In fact it has less than nothing to do with anything, as even the original whitepaper goes through great lengths to specify that it's lab observations and only compares versions of oracle, none of which would have been relevant to you if you'd refused to use oracle in the first place.

And Oracle never forbid running benchmarks (maybe they could now, they wouldn't have had the tracking and C3 to do so back in the 80s), DeWitt Clauses forbid publishing benchmarks without prior approval.

> Claiming I've called author anything is putting words in my mouth.

You're asserting that you can not trust oracle's numbers, in response to an article by a (former) oracle employee talking about "their" sort algorithm and the numbers it got.

There are only two possibilities here:

1. you got hopelessly lost in both space and time as you were looking for a 20 years ago thread on the linked oracle whitepaper, and your comments have nothing to do with TFA

2. you're calling the TFAA a liar who can not be trusted, given they're the author of the algorithm, givesthe same number, and in fact originally derived the rough gain when implementing and benchmarking the algorithm:

> once I had this implemented within the Oracle DBMS I was able to compare it with the old sort. The new sort was often about 5 times faster than the old sort.

So which is it?