Re: Informix: Please buy Borland

pablo@mew.corp.sgi.com (Pablo Sanchez) wrote: : :In article <33146861.31595912@gate.idg.no>, Nils.Myklebust@idg.no writes: :> :> Sybase may have spread their resources to thin, but their basic error :> was in their server design. : :Would you please elaborate on this basic error? I'm curious to hear :your point of view on this. The following was that elaboration: :> They spent a lot of effort in designing paralell queries in a way :> that simply couldn't work, and also didn't. : :As far as I know, parallel queries aren't due until the 11.g release :which is coming out within the next couple of months. They tried (or intended to try) to parallelize thair database by running multiple instances of the engine and have a front end that split sql statements into parts that would be sent off to different engines. This couldn't work and didn't. If parallell queries aren't available yet, it's another indicator that Sybase is behind and have to spend their effort in these areas. How can they follow up on the now important issues such as creating an object relational DBMS? :> Several other parts of their database is also far behind. Last year :> they had 20 programmers working on row level locking. : :I don't know the number of engineers working on row level locking but According to an interview with some executive in some magazine at the time (I could have found the names if it had been important). :yes this is some what true... although the added overhead of row :level locking vesus page level locking is rather argumentative... It is not. For some types of applications page level locking simply doesn't work or at least requires extensive design effort to make it work. Aditionally as far as I know the SAP/R3 system doesn't run on a database without row level locking. That may be their design error, but that's not particularly helpfull to Sybase. :> Sybase simply doesn't have good enough designers. : :This sounds extremely subjective... Yes, but it's based on the technical problems they have had lately. System 10 was a disaster and they still have problems in that they are behind in several areas. May be it's the management who haven't given the designers the resources they need. :I tend to believe that their named cache functionality is something :that Informix/Oracle will be bolting on. It doesn't make sense to :have a single buffer cache for VLDB with huge gobs of shared memory: :> 2GIG May be. Sybase have done some nice things as well. Nils.Myklebust@idg.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org