Re: Informix vs. Oracle

sethg@dcatlas.dot.gov (Seth Grimes) writes: >I say this is a typical salesperson BS. Oracle is out in the lead by far, >especially because Informix has ignored or abandoned important market >sectors like VAX/VMS. Informix is a Unix DBMS; Oracle is on loads of >platforms. Oracle is integrating their DBMS with lots of applications; >does Informix sell anything but the DBMS. Informix made a deliberate decision not to support VAX/VMS. This policy allowed us to provide better database engines and development tools for UNIX. To do otherwise, or to start developing applications software, would have spread our resources too thin. It was not a bad decision; we have had record revenues for several quarters in a row. Our stock price, which was lower than Oracle's in early 1991, is now 2-1/2 times higher, and our earnings-per-share is much higher than our competition. It is now widely recognized that the UNIX market is growing, and the VAX/VMS market is declining. We also run on "loads of platforms", but all of them are UNIX or DOS. Because Oracle runs on every platform under the sun, it takes them forever to roll out a new product. At my last company, Oracle salespeople showed us a 35mm slide show about Oracle Version 7. This was in July of 1990. The product was not actually released until this month ... two years later! Talk about "vaporware!" I can tell you also that after working with Informix on a UNIX platform, trying to develop applications with Oracle under VMS was an eye-opening experience. Not only is VMS an inferior operating system for programmers (what? No 'grep'? No pipes?), Oracle was a very complex, buggy, and frustrating product to work with. Their biggest weakness is the lack of a useful 4GL programming language. We were left with only Oracle Cobol. I made the wise move: I quit and started working for Informix. >And lastly, Oracle has a great >marketing department, although their hype caught up with them last summer >when some of their accounting practices like premature recording of sales >and penchant for vaporware became exposed. How else could such a mediocre >product have captured so much of the market? That is quite correct: Oracle had the right marketing hype at the right time. Their "vaporware" and accounting practices got exposed before last summer. "Information Week" had a scathing cover article in April of 1990, and several newspapers covered the controversy in the summer of 1990. -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Randall Rhea Informix Software, Inc. Project Manager, MIS Sales/Marketing Systems uunet!pyramid!infmx!randall