I like vendors benchmarks as they are often good illustrations of worst practice. Rather than focusing on real implementation trade-offs, they pick an extreme case that favors their own implementation by chance but is not optimized in the competitor's — because it is simply not how that technology is meant to be used. For example, Oracle published a "2x" benchmark results using YCSB, a key-value benchmark (slide 14 here ), and a "529x" test misusing the raw BSON purpose ( here ). Both have something in common: they compare a relational database against a document database by using neither technology as it was designed to be used — no normalized tables, no nested documents, just flat key-value fields. The latter test is even worse: it uses 1,000 top-level fields in a single document. Don't do that! While having thousands of columns in an SQL table is usually undesirable, it's acceptable to have hundreds or even thousands of fields in a document, as they represent multiple entities and value objects.…