And, yes there are a couple of new 10g native float datatypes (e.g., BINARY_FLOAT, BINARY_DOUBLE), but how arithmetic operations are performed on these are a porting decision. Let’s stick to the things that happen thousands or tens of thousands of times per second (e.g., buffer gets, latching, etc, etc). There are some floating point ops in layers that don’t execute at high frequency and therefore are not of interest. The core Oracle kernel does not, by and large, use floating point operations. I think most of you know how much I dislike red herring marketing techniques, so I’ll point out that there has been a good deal of web- FUD about the fact that the 8-core packaging of the CoolThreads architecture all share a single floating point unit (FPU). Since this is an Oracle blog, I’ll address this with an Oracle-oriented answer. I have heard though that the CoolThread processors are not always great at supporting databases because they only have a single floating point processor? Would you see this as a problem in either a OLTP or DSS environment that don’t have any requirement for calculations that may involve floating points? The question posed was what performance effect there would be with DSS or OLTP with the Sun CoolThreads architecture-given it has a single FPU shared by 8 cores. One of my blog readers posted this comment. I’ll try not to make a habit of referencing a comment on my blog as subject matter for a new post, but this one is worth it.