Re: Market Share

Joe (Praise the Lawd!) Lumbley wrote: >Thomas J Kyte (tkyte@us.oracle.com) wrote: > ><some long never-ending diatribe saying: > > mine is bigger than yours > I can piss further than you can > Oracle employees who post here do often come across as somehow insecure, don't they? :) >Folks, these are technical newsgroups, meaning that we look here for >info about technical and software questions. Do we have to put up >with these endless games? Who cares about market share from a user >level? All of your companies are too big and too full of themselves. >Spend some time supporting your customers rather than making fools >of yourselves. Once again, some lucid, cogent reasoning. Informix works as a database. So does (ugh!) Oracle. So does Sybase. Horses for courses. Different strokes, etc. At the end of the day, you have to feel comfortable with the level of support and the business relationship you get with your SW vendor. I, for one, would be very worried about dealing with Oracle, 'cos all their staff sit and post e-mail on competitive newsgroups all day long! :) Market share isn't worth a hat full of dandruff when it comes to resolving a business issue. Informix, Oracle and Sybase are all viable products. What you need to know is: will they support you? does the technology address your key business problems? will they still be in business tomorrow? do you have access to third parties for skills? FWIW, I think that the issues that should be considered when buying a "large" database are things like ease of installation and administration, support, available tools, etc. Even performance isn't that much of an issue in most cases, performance is either acceptable or it's not. In general (and I know this is a pretty sweeping statement), and end user will not notice any difference whether a record is returned in 0.1 seconds or 0.5 seconds. So even benchmarks, which are the other major trolling subject in CDI, are pretty irrelevant in a day-to-day environment. Now before anybody tries to crucify me for this generalisation, I would like to point out that we don't all run airlines or data warehouses or banks or similar high-volume, high-performance applications. Most business applications (certainly the ones I've worked on - about 60 over the last 10 years) don't need to beat TPC records. >I notice that it's mostly Oracle folks who are doing all this chest- >thumping. It is odd that you get very few sh*t-stirring articles from Sybase staff and others, and so many from Oracle people. >I hear Larry Ellison is still requiring all Oracle folks to take his >"How to Strut Sitting Down" seminar. Sounds like fun. Y'all wanna give us a few lessons, Mr Kyte? :) -- Cheers, Billy "Have you got it yet?" (c) Dazza, 1995