Re: Company thought DB2 will be better than Oracle.

Neil Truby wrote (in part): > I don't accept your basic premise that DB2 UDB is a significant > player in the UNIX/Linix/Windows market. Lacking marketing statistics, I have no idea. > > True, IBM is unlikely to go out of business or be taken over. But it > has two rdbms products in the UNIX/Linux/Windows space. One, with > decent reputation for reliability, speed and all those good things > you want, they are killing through lack of (marketing) support. May I assume you mean Informix? > The other (DB2 UDB), no matter what its undoubted merits, is a > marginal player IN THIS SPACE. IBM's strategy is to hope that > customers will migrate from Informix to DB2 UDB. The reality in my > expereince is that the customers we lose are moving to Oracle or, > more and more, SQL Server, usually under prompting from their ISVs. > > My point is, I don't understand why IBM thinks that customers, > forced into a migration by the way things have panned out, are going > to choose DB2 UDB ahead of more prominent alternatives. > I am, I suppose, an atypical DB2 UDB user. I run it on my desktop workstation (2 processors, two 10,000rpm SCSI hard drives). I have one instance running with one database. I am presently running Red Hat Linux 7.3 on it, which requires fiddling around with makefiles and stuff so I use old versions of various libraries. This would probably be solved were I to upgrade from DB2 V6.1, but I am not prepared to do that until DB2 V8.2 comes out so I can run it on something like Red Hat Enterprise 3.0 Why do I do this instead of running postgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, or Informix? I started out with postgreSQL in 1998 or so. At that time it did not work right: with one version, views did not work. With the other version at the time, I could not have a primary key. I had not heard of MySQL and when I finally did hear of it, it could not do transaction locking. Perhaps that is fixed now. I considered Oracle at the time, but their license agreement was so confusing that I did not dare use it, and I was unwilling to pay a lawyer to explain what it meant to me. So I switched to Informix. It worked just OK on Red Hat Linux 5.0, but when I upgraded to Red Hat Linux 6.0, I could not even read the CD-ROM so I assumed the CD-ROM was defective (though it did not look scratched). E-mail to Informix got only the answer that they did not know if it worked on 6.0 or not. I replied that if they would send me a new CD-ROM, I would try it and find out for them. I never heard from them again, so in disgust I went to DB2-UDB 6.1 and it has worked fine ever since. The other problem with Informix was it had no C++ API, so I had to write zillions of little C++ to C interface routines and keep them working. Not the way to go. Now it is true that IBM did not own Informix at the time, so I do not blame them. -- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. /V\\ Registered Machine 73926. /( )\\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org ^^-^^ 8:55am up 21 days, 7:30, 2 users, load average: 2.08, 2.08, 2.10