Re: Informix on Linux, add another
On Wed, 8 Oct 1997 11:10:40 -0500, Richard Stanford <richards@herald.net> wrote: >> Cesar wrote: > >> > However, I am stammered by the fact that that Oracle, Sun, Informix, >> > (and Apple ) have powerful weopons but did not use them to counter the >> > NT onslaught. >> > It is like they are just sitting idly by and letting Windows take over. >Er, and why not? In case you missed it, Informix does not actually market >a Windows competitor. They do, in fact, sell a reasonable workgroup-level >server that /depends/ on the success of NT. As they said at the show, Win >NT is expected to provide 40% of their market in the next few years. I do >not see any reason for them to come out against it. The problem is that Microsoft is not selling NT as an operating system platform; they are continually expanding the set of "nearly-included-by-default" applications to include a whole raft of things. Web servers, web browsers, "office-non-productivity," amongst others. In general, their applications are pretty shoddy, but they commonly enough are "just good enough" to convince managers that it's good enough for "real world apps." The one that is salient to this newsgroup is their version of Sybase SQL Server. It's certainly not as robust or scalable as database systems like Informix (or competitors such as DB/2 or Oracle), but the point is that Microsoft most certainly *is* targetting to push other database systems out of the marketplace by tying NT and SQL Server together. Today, Microsoft may be "friendly," encouraging DBMS vendors to port their products to NT, with the story being: "Users that need to do large scale database work need to have a highly scalable database system, like [Informix|Oracle], and we encourage our 'business partners' to provide good implementations of their database systems." A significant portion of that really being: "We are happy to have database vendors like Informix encouraging companies to buy our products so that we can build up user base so that we can wean them onto our own database systems once we get them debugged, I mean slightly less unstable." A year or so from now, I would expect the story to be more like: "Users that need to do unusually large scale database work may need to use specialized database systems, like [Informix|Oracle]. Of course, with the [nextgenerationclustering] technology that will be available in 2001, you'll be able to use our SQL Server product, which incidentally is deeply integrated into our web server system and our user administration system as well as our TP monitor which you'll have to have installed anyways. If you don't have remarkably unusual requirements, you really don't need any of their products..." (Not mentioning, of course, that the process of getting Informix/Oracle working well on NT will essentially teach Microsoft how to get SQL Server to have the performance needed to squeeze the other vendors out...) -- cbbrowne@hex.net, <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne>; Q: Where would Microsoft take you today? A: Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis... Spam bait: domreg@cyberpromo.com postmaster@netvigator.com postmaster@onlinebiz.net pmdatropos@aol.com admin@submitking.com cte@llv.com walt@pwrnet.com