"Everybody's guilty of that kind of exaggeration," said database industry analyst Curt Monash of Monash Research. "Oracle tends to be even a little guiltier than others."

"If your new system can't outperform somebody else's old system by a huge factor on at least some queries, you're doing something wrong," he added. "Use newer, better hardware; use newer, better software; have a top sales engineer do a great job of tuning it and of course you'll see huge performance results."

This is the second ruling by the NAD in favor of IBM over Oracle in recent months. In April, the group recommended that Oracle pull ads containing pricing and performance claims that compared its Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 computer system to a competing IBM platform.

Oracle disagreed with some of the NAD's conclusions , according to the group.

The IDG News Service