No future for DB2

This article is very bleak about future of DB2. How credible is the author. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1839681,00.asp

On 2005-07-25, rkusenet <rkusenet@hotmail.com> wrote: > This article is very bleak about future of DB2. How credible is the > author. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1839681,00.asp Predictions are hard. Especially if they're about the future. Or so goes the saying. hth Rene fup to comp.databases.ibm-db2 -- Rene Nyffenegger http://www.adp-gmbh.ch/

rkusenet wrote: > This article is very bleak about future of DB2. How credible is the > author. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1839681,00.asp I am not familiar with the author. What information the article does contain certainly appears to be on target and seems fairly accurate in my opinion.

rkusenet wrote: > This article is very bleak about future of DB2. How credible is the > author. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1839681,00.asp This guy sounds like a magazine troll. The more I work with DB2, the more I appreciate its power. Maybe the world is just starting to catch up with DB2. -- Texeme http://texeme.com

"rkusenet" <rkusenet@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:3kkd26FurndhU1@individual.net... > This article is very bleak about future of DB2. How credible is the > author. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1839681,00.asp > There are several inaccuracies and illogical statements made in the article. For example he says that Oracle has won the Linux market because "Oracle that was willing to make the bold move by announcing at Oracle World its intention to convert its entire back office infrastructure to run Linux." AFAIK, all relevant IBM software runs on Linux, so I don't know what he is talking about. Oracle may being doing very well on Linux, but that is mostly at the expense of Oracle on other platforms. His other basic premise is that the market is not big enough for 3 premium RDBMS vendors, and that DB2 will be odd man out. I don't see that happening anytime soon, if ever. The market is plenty big for all three, plus MySQL for some time to come. Both IBM and Microsoft have one big advantage over Oracle in that RDBMS's only represent a small part of their overall revenue, and they can afford to cut prices, unlike Oracle who depends heavily on database revenues. So IBM will be able to undercut Oracle on pricing, and that will allow them to have a respectable market share. Most people on this forum are more concerned about job prospects than which RDBMS is better or the actual number of database licenses for a particular vendor. The real key is supply vs. demand. If there are more Oracle DBA's than jobs for Oracle DBA's, then the job prospects may be dimmer than a less popular database with fewer available DBA's. Since their is plenty of room to make Oracle a lot easier to manage with fewer DBA's (DB2 and MS SQL Server are already easy to use) then the job prospects for Oracle DBA's may actually get worse even if the installed base gets larger.

"John Bailo" <jabailo@texeme.com> wrote in message news:54CdneG9vLihv3jfRVn-rw@speakeasy.net... > rkusenet wrote: > >> This article is very bleak about future of DB2. How credible is the >> author. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1839681,00.asp > > This guy sounds like a magazine troll. > > The more I work with DB2, the more I appreciate its power. > > Maybe the world is just starting to catch up with DB2. Take it from comp.databases.informix, John, that the quality of the product is more-or-less immaterial. My first love is Informix. I've administered DB2, SQL Server and Oracle and - no flames please, it's just an honest opinion - nothing comes close to Informix for its elegance, ease of administration and astonishing, leave-for-years, reliability. As a Certified DB2 UDB Specialist I happen to agree with your warm thoughts about DB2 to an extent. All this counts for nothing. The best product does not necessarily win out. The best-positioned, and best-marketed product does. So you may be right, and the magazine author may be a troll and he may be completely wrong. But if he is wrong it isn't because of any of DB2's (or Oracle's, or SQL Server's) inherent qualities.

Mark A wrote: > "rkusenet" <rkusenet@hotmail.com> wrote in message > news:3kkd26FurndhU1@individual.net... > >>This article is very bleak about future of DB2. How credible is the >>author. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1839681,00.asp >> > > > There are several inaccuracies and illogical statements made in the article. > For example he says that Oracle has won the Linux market because "Oracle > that was willing to make the bold move by announcing at Oracle World its > intention to convert its entire back office infrastructure to run Linux." > AFAIK, all relevant IBM software runs on Linux, so I don't know what he is > talking about. When he says 'entire back office infrastructure' he is talking about Oracle's internal business apps (i.e General Ledger, AR, Payroll, eMail, Document Management, Support, CRM etc). AFAIK, IBM does not have equivalent software. Oracle may being doing very well on Linux, but that is mostly > at the expense of Oracle on other platforms. Oracle is also showing good growth on Windows (at least according to Gartner). Any supposed decline in Unix platforms is so negligble to be hardly measurable. > His other basic premise is that the market is not big enough for 3 premium > RDBMS vendors, and that DB2 will be odd man out. I don't see that happening > anytime soon, if ever. The market is plenty big for all three, plus MySQL > for some time to come. Probably very true. > Both IBM and Microsoft have one big advantage over Oracle in that RDBMS's > only represent a small part of their overall revenue, and they can afford to > cut prices, unlike Oracle who depends heavily on database revenues. So IBM > will be able to undercut Oracle on pricing, and that will allow them to have > a respectable market share. Yes IBM can undercut Oracle on pricing and in fact can bundle the database with hardware and/or global services. However, it doesn't seem to actually be helping (at least in the deals I have been involved in) > Most people on this forum are more concerned about job prospects than which > RDBMS is better or the actual number of database licenses for a particular > vendor. The real key is supply vs. demand. If there are more Oracle DBA's > than jobs for Oracle DBA's, then the job prospects may be dimmer than a less > popular database with fewer available DBA's. Since their is plenty of room > to make Oracle a lot easier to manage with fewer DBA's (DB2 and MS SQL > Server are already easy to use) then the job prospects for Oracle DBA's may > actually get worse even if the installed base gets larger. Some how I doubt that. There are a couple of key 'speed of light' issues that mean that DBAs will be needed for many, many years. The first is that we are managing more data than ever before, and being asked to manage it for longer periods of time. The second is that the number of DBAs overall is declining, not growing, as the baby boomers start to enter enmasse into retirement. Not sure how a supply and demand argument for DB2 (less popular database with fewer available DBA's) strengthens the total TCO argument either. Buy a cheaper database and pay more to have someone look after it ?

"Mark Townsend" <markbtownsend@comcast.net> wrote in message > When he says 'entire back office infrastructure' he is talking about > Oracle's internal business apps (i.e General Ledger, AR, Payroll, eMail, > Document Management, Support, CRM etc). AFAIK, IBM does not have > equivalent software. > That is exactly why the statement is illogical. IBM does not have such backend software, so how can IBM be faulted for not converting software it does not have? AFAIK, IBM has made all of it's database and related software run on Linux, including Linux running on IBM mainframes. I certainly am not discounting that Oracle has a larger market share than DB2 on Linux, but the article made it seem like IBM did something wrong by not supporting Linux for their own software.

rkusenet wrote: > This article is very bleak about future of DB2. How credible is the > author. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1839681,00.asp > DB2 takes a bit of getting used to, but it IS easy to use compared to Oracle. DB2 also takes a rather logical path in its hierarchy of its architecture, which translates into an easy-to-understand engine. It has its own quirks, like any product, but it will work well in shops looking to make a move from SQL-Server, or other engines. As far as Oracle, it really is Oracle-vs-Everyone-Else, on the merits that Oracle does not live by pessimistic locking--it is an optimistic locking engine, the only one worth mentioning. The important point here is that application development for Oracle is different than say for Everyone-Else on that alone. Having said that it means that if anyone really stands to be "odd-man-out" it would be Oracle, not DB2. It is far easier to get DB2 working in SQL-Server shops, and get people to actually using it. DB2 has a very easy to understand architecture, like Informix, and has a lot of features Informix should have, like table-level memory-management. All the big vendors will do the leap-frog of who-is-better but none of them are judged on a day. Besides in many IT shops Oracle is an application requiring support, not an application development environment. This is important to note, because it means Oracle is only as important as its applications. Outside of Oracle applications, Oracle has a lot more to worry about than DB2. It is also important to note that DB2 is also being used in a utilitarian way on a lot of IBM hardware, and in Websphere, so its hard to say that DB2 is in "trouble". It runs well, and takes a lot of abuse, similar to SQL-Server. While it might be more favorable to work on your pet DB, most shops are using more than just one DB anyway, so it's safe to say DB2 will be around for a while.

Mark A wrote: > I certainly am not discounting that Oracle has a larger market share than > DB2 on Linux, but the article made it seem like IBM did something wrong by > not supporting Linux for their own software. We have to be careful with 'market share'. Oracle, for instance, during its heydey, went around selling Oracle to almost anyone they could browbeat into buying a copy. Whether those databases amounted to anything useful or not .. who knows. Same with SQL Server. Everyone and his brother has a SQL Server instance set up...but how many of those are being used for a single table of contacts? I maintain, and I have no data just experience, that IBM, the iSeries ( which is a DB2 UDB ), p and z Series DB2 installations are almost entirely being used for /real/ applications...transactional applications...live business applications. And, while the iSeries has declined in revenue somewhat since inception, it's staging a comeback...which means a comeback for DB2. What is more, the architecture of OS400 (everything an object in a database) may have been radical for 1989...but now, with Longhorn (or whatever they call it) aping the OS400, one has to say, "yeah, IBM has been there all along". So, let's get real. DB2 runs the world. Other RDBMS run vanity systems and developer projects that never went anywhere. -- Texeme http://texeme.com

> AFAIK, IBM has made all of it's database and related software run on > Linux, including Linux running on IBM mainframes. > IMO, the only thing sounds more ludicrous than Linux on mainframe is Java on mainframe. Has anybody at IBM done the math on price/performance?

"Bob Jones" <email@me.not> wrote in message news:C0gFe.486$kk6.393@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com... >> AFAIK, IBM has made all of it's database and related software run on >> Linux, including Linux running on IBM mainframes. >> > > IMO, the only thing sounds more ludicrous than Linux on mainframe is Java > on mainframe. Has anybody at IBM done the math on price/performance? Price-performance ain't what it used to be. Mainframes are air-cooled and some PC's (including some Mac servers) are water cooled these days. Many mainframes use the same enterprise storage systems as most UNIX servers.

Data Goob wrote > As far as Oracle, it really is Oracle-vs-Everyone-Else, on the merits > that Oracle does not live by pessimistic locking--it is an optimistic > locking engine, the only one worth mentioning. The important point > here is that application development for Oracle is different than > say for Everyone-Else on that alone. Having said that it means that > if anyone really stands to be "odd-man-out" it would be Oracle, not > DB2. It is far easier to get DB2 working in SQL-Server shops, and > get people to actually using it. This is a funny way of looking at. Obviously Oracle's none locking engine is perfectly suited to scaling multi user applications, particularly when most people are developing for stateless clients. The fact that developers have to go through the same gyrations for most other databses, copying data to private sessions to avoid locks, can hardly be a long term benefit for those databases. Yes developers hit problems moving to Oracle because of this but it is mostly because they want to do things that are no longer needed, see all the posts about creating temp tables in Oracle. You very rarely need to, just run the query, this is a database not a file system. The whole idea is you say what you want and let the database work out how to get it. This is alien to many developers, but is is also in part alien to databases that don't let you just run a query, or insert what you want to, without first working out how to go about it and not tread on other users of the system. Obviously without these benefits competition is easier between locking databases, so it if it is easier to move between DB2 and SQL Server, as the technical merits are closer, it becomes more of a choice of OS or hardware and the database can become secondary. I don't see how this protects DB2 share as IBM does not have a good track record when it comes up against Microsoft in the software market. IBM's software business plays third fiddle behind hardware and services. It is a huge assumption that ease of migration will result in movement mostly from SQL Server to DB2. Of course all this might change if reports of Microsoft's efforts to turn SQL Server into a none locking database are true. Although, again I don't see how DB2 being the only big, locking database along with Informix, Sybase and Ingres (maybe?) is going to help it much either. -- MJB

rkusenet wrote: > This article is very bleak about future of DB2. How credible is the > author. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1839681,00.asp > The author forgets a couple of things: DB2 is the only RDBMS that runs on mainframe, midrange and PC servers. (Oracle is non-existent on the mainframe) There is more data stored in DB2 than in any other DBMS product. The article is pure FUD. -- Anton Versteeg IBM Netherlands

When you really get down to it both AIX and Linux are just different versions of UNIX. Our AIX machines are every bit as powerful as the mainframe we migrated off of a decade ago. So Linux on a mainframe makes perfect sense if you want to run a UNIX style system and the cost of Linux is less than other available operating systems. IBM is now trying to sell by service units and Java is expensive to run under this pricing method; however, IBM sells for a very reasonable sum Java co-processing units that remove the Java processing from the billing. Since the underlying concept of Java is write once run anywhere the ability to run Java on a mainframe makes perfect sense. Whether it is the best tool for the job at hand is a different question since most code written on a mainframe will ever run anywhere but on the mainframe. But then again if your shop has mainframes, midrange servers, and PC's to support the ability to have the programmers write in Java on all three platforms instead of Visual Basic on the PC, C on the Unix servers, and COBOL on the mainframe can be a real benefit. IMHO -- Mark D Powell --

On 2005-07-26, Anton Versteeg <Anton_Versteeg@nnll.ibm.com> wrote: > rkusenet wrote: >> This article is very bleak about future of DB2. How credible is the >> author. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1839681,00.asp >> > > The author forgets a couple of things: > DB2 is the only RDBMS that runs on mainframe, midrange and PC servers. > (Oracle is non-existent on the mainframe) > There is more data stored in DB2 than in any other DBMS product. > > The article is pure FUD. Oracle does run on the host. Mike

How credible is the author? This calls for a lexical analysis! He mentions DB2 by name over 20 times, but he also mentions himself more than a dozen times. So he is promoting himself whilst disparaging DB2 at a 3:5 ratio. He also uses the word "irregardless", so eWeek may not have thought it worthwhile to have an editor cleanse his prose. Merriam-Webster provides this helpful advice on the word "irregardless": "Etymology: probably blend of irrespective and regardless usage Irregardless originated in dialectal American speech in the early 20th century. Its fairly widespread use in speech called it to the attention of usage commentators as early as 1927. The most frequently repeated remark about it is that "there is no such word." There is such a word, however. It is still used primarily in speech, although it can be found from time to time in edited prose. Its reputation has not risen over the years, and it is still a long way from general acceptance. Use regardless instead."

"bka" <badamache@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:1122397257.304609.170140@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com... > He also uses the word "irregardless", so eWeek may > not have thought it worthwhile to have an editor cleanse his prose. Or he might just be American.

Strunk and White were American: Strunk and White's The Elements of Style (4th ed.): "Irregardless. Should be regardless. The error results from failure to see the negative in -less and from a desire to get it in as a prefix, suggested by such words as irregular, irresponsible, and perhaps especially, irrespective."