Re: An interesting meeting with IBM

Scott Burns <scott@mirrabooka.com> writes: > Ronald Cole wrote: >>If IBM will release a version of DB2 that will run on any Red Hat OS >>released within the past year, then I'll take a good look at it. > > Erm, we only finished jumping through the hoops required to get > Informix running properly on RH9/RHEL3.0 last week. To be honest, > sqlexecd and dbaccess still have problems. It only took us a year or > so to get to this point, and we are a paying customer with with a > support bill in the tens of thousands a year. > > By your reasoning, we should not bother with either of DB2 or Informix. No, it's by IBM's reasoning. Why release a new port (Informix SE) to an OS release (RHL9) two months after Red Hat end-of-life's it? My experience with IBM is that they won't support their product on unsupported OS releases. RHL9 will be unsupported by Red Hat in two weeks! RHEL3? I don't know what Red Hat's problem is. It sure isn't as stable as RHL9, and many parts are broken. I've got several open bugs in Bugzilla that are STILL waiting for someone at Red Hat to own them and fix them. It's a new definition of "Enterprise Computing" to be sure!

Ronald Cole wrote: >Scott Burns <scott@mirrabooka.com> writes: > > >>Ronald Cole wrote: >> >> >>>If IBM will release a version of DB2 that will run on any Red Hat OS >>>released within the past year, then I'll take a good look at it. >>> >>> >>Erm, we only finished jumping through the hoops required to get >>Informix running properly on RH9/RHEL3.0 last week. To be honest, >>sqlexecd and dbaccess still have problems. It only took us a year or >>so to get to this point, and we are a paying customer with with a >>support bill in the tens of thousands a year. >> >>By your reasoning, we should not bother with either of DB2 or Informix. >> >> > >No, it's by IBM's reasoning. Why release a new port (Informix SE) to >an OS release (RHL9) two months after Red Hat end-of-life's it? My >experience with IBM is that they won't support their product on >unsupported OS releases. RHL9 will be unsupported by Red Hat in two >weeks! RHEL3? I don't know what Red Hat's problem is. It sure isn't >as stable as RHL9, and many parts are broken. I've got several open >bugs in Bugzilla that are STILL waiting for someone at Red Hat to own >them and fix them. It's a new definition of "Enterprise Computing" to >be sure! > > I have two good reasons: 1) any version will not be RH9 specific but glibc 2.3/nptl specific. RH9 may be out of date, but glibc 2.3 and nptl will be with us for some time to come. Fixing it for RH9 should also fix it for the next few years worth of linux distros. If the reasoning was RH9 was soon to be gone, they have lost a year. 2) many companies, mine included, will still be deploying RH9 for some time to come. What are our other alternatives? RHEL at hundreds of dollars a year? Fedora? Hah! Mandrake is dancing with financial troubles, SuSE just got it's owner replaced and Debian seems to boast about being actively user hostile. Compare that with a stable RH9, especially in places which don't bother about updating the OS anyway, and it's hard to justify any other course (well, maybe RH8). The linux market is just in too big a state of change at the moment to go making too huge a change. >From where I sit, Red Hat forced the 2.6 kernel on everyone a year >early, and IBM has been too slow in porting for it. I'd say it's >going to take the better part of a year before IBM products work as >well on RHEL3 as they did on RHL7.3. In the meantime, us developers >are screwed. I'm watching one of my clients move to Oracle on Solaris >because there currently isn't a fully functioning IBM solution >(J/Foundation or Java2) on a supported Red Hat OS. > > > I bought this up on the recent RH world tour in the drinks session. The response from the RH guy was essentially to put the Informix stuff onto IBM's shoulders. It strikes me as more than a little irish that I can get an up to date version of SE for SCO through support whereas we have to fight to get a "sort of" solution to have SE run on any supported version of red hat. By the 2.6 kernel I assume you mean backporting nptl to 2.4. I won't argue. We've been pretty much screwed for the past year, when a simple, acknowledged unsupported recompile of SE would have gotten us through. Instead, we're about to deploy our second system with Postgres. For our modest database needs it more than suffices. IBM are going to run up against people like us more and more in the future, and I don't think the current strategy is going to cut it. All of this, of course, ignores my initial point. The situation of Linux/DB2 is roughly the same as Linux/Informix and doesn't really make a case for not looking at DB2. -- Scott Burns Mirrabooka Systems Tel +61 7 3857 7899 Fax +61 7 3857 1368