Speaking at an event for customers and media in Santa Clara, California, on December 2, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison tried to convince investors and customers to get behind his planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems, saying that Sun’s servers had set a new record for database performance.

Saying that Sun will apparently perform better under his control than it had under predecessors, Ellison added: “We're engineering the hardware and engineering the software to work together.”

According to Oracle’s claims, 27 computers equipped with Sun’s Sparc chips managed to clock a speed of 30.2 million transactions per second while running a database performance benchmark. The speed achieved by the Sparc chips was three-fold faster than a test result announced by IBM in August, as well as higher than an earlier benchmark announced by Hewlett-Packard (HP).

For the record, Oracle completed its whopping $7.3-billion acquisition of server manufacturer Sun in January 2010. The Sun takeover put Oracle in direct competition with computer hardware makers, including bigwigs like IBM and HP.

Meanwhile, noting that database benchmarks essentially depicts the capability of a supplier’s computers to businesses, along with the price of using them to run their day-to-day operations, Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at market researcher Insight 64, said that Oracle “is shattering the previous benchmarks” with a higher performance, that too at a comparatively lower price.