Big Blue released new SPECjEnterprise 2010 benchmarking statistics on Friday that it said "demonstrate how businesses using IBM WebSphere middleware on Power 7 hardware can get the lowest cost for performance in the industry." IBM also claimed that it "has proven 76 percent higher performance than Oracle overall."

In addition, IBM has launched a new website that . "Are you overpaying for Oracle Database? Hint. You're overpaying for Oracle Database," one barb reads.

An Oracle spokeswoman could not immediately comment.

While such chest-beating is nothing new in the software industry, and occurs even as Oracle and IBM , this particular dispute has a significant backstory.

In September 2009, the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) US$10,000 over an advertisement Oracle placed in the Wall Street Journal, which claimed that a system using Oracle hardware and software ran faster than an IBM combination, based on TPC benchmarks.