Re: Who is the competition?

Neil Truby wrote: > Each of the first two speakers, both of whom mentioned Oracle as "the > competition", were US-based. Perhaps Oracle is the main competition in the > United States. Certainly the first guy in particular seemed surprised when > we all told him that in our experience the users are haemorrhaging to SQL > Server, not Oracle ... We use IDS for our OLTP application which we sell as a package to our customers. Most customers accept what we recommend but in both the US and UK some customers expect MS SQL Server for various reasons, the main one being their internal IT policy. Other reasons are nice GUI, IT skills, comfort factors. We absolutely have to have replication of some form and we use HDR for replication with IDS which works very well. With MSSQL there are two options (sort of) suitable for us: transactional replication (this is a pig to maintain and severely disruptive if the schema changes) and clustering (expensive). So MSSQL loses for good sound reasons and usually we manage to sell IDS. But for us the pressure is definitely to use MSSQL from some quarters. No-one has ever specifically requested any other DBMS, IDS included. Ben.