Oracle and Sun part deux...

Yes, you can still see Oracle milking the PR push on their commitment to Sun. Oracle is moving their planned announcement of their TCP-C work on Sun a month early. Rumor has it that they're doing a 'database appliance'? You can find the url on el Reg, because I'm being lazy. The point is that Oracle on Sun is getting mileage. IDS, an IBM product is still in the shadows and IBM appears to have walked away from the 'go to marketing' strategy of lead with IDS as the OLTP database of choice. But that's lame. How can they say that to their sales force when their sales force can barely spell IDS or knows what it means. (BTW, how many Informix Heritage sales reps are still with IBM?) Now to be fair, Oracle isn't pushing their rhetoric as a way to declare war with IBM. IBM's too dumb to realize that their getting their ass kicked because they're only concerned with the numbers they can product from their H, I and J level customers. :-O ;-P Oracle is pushing this because they have to in order to get EU approval of the deal. Its not a bad thing really. So the question remains, what will IBM do to counter this? My bet is that they'll build out some super AIX beast on P and SSD arrays running DB2. Serge will pop out of the wood work and claim that they don't have IDS set up for TPC-C benchmarks and because of the time constraints they went with DB2 instead. And of course, he'll cross post this to the DB2 newsgroups just to get some wanker to talk about how great DB2 is on Linux. All I can say is that if you look at certain features that are in IDS and compare them to DB2 and Oracle, you'll find that there really isn't any comparison. Outside of the extensibility options... (Data Cartridges and I forget what IBM called their DB2 extensions), one thing that comes to mind is temp tables. If you don't think they're important, then I suggest you try dealing with very large sets of data where you can only apply a single index. (Hint: You apply the first index sending the result set in to a temp table. Then you index the temp table on your second column and apply a secondary query to get your next subset or final set. (If you only have two indexes...)) Of course, it had already been posted here about a year ago that XPS allowed one to use multiple indexes on a query... ;-) But hey what do I know? I mean I'm sure one could come up with other examples of how IDS is actually a much better platform that either DB2 or Oracle. And since I'm posting to the Informix user group, I would really be amazed if no one did step forward with a list of features... ;-) -G _________________________________________________________________ Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/171222985/direct/01/