With the upcoming IIUG conference, lets put some ideas on the table...

Wow. For those who are going to attend the conference, please lets try and keep grounded and focus on a couple of things. 1) We learned from Diane Fraiman that 'Stealth Marketing' doesn't work. Its really code for 'My company doesn't want to waste any money on yet another unsuccessful marketing campaign.'. And that's really a comment about the sales and marketing management team's inabilities and not the fact that IBM doesn't have money to spend on marketing. Of course we all know that short term profitability over long term stability only helps to line the current CEO's pockets with bonuses and vesting stock options. Right Phil White? ;-) Sorry if I'm a bit jaded. Even though I made a decent profit by selling out of the money covered calls every month, I still think that Phil cooked the books to hide the fact that his purchase of Illustra, although encouraged by the Board, was a bit tougher to digest than originally thought. Unlike IBM where Sam's just trying to squeeze as much as he can from the company until he retires. ;-) Yet I digress. The point I was trying to make is that IBM's Information Management hasn't done anything to promote any of their brands. Of course DB2 is still synonymous with IBM and no one but Informix users and ex- Informix users know who or what IDS is... So when you meet with Alyse and Inhi, please feel free to ask them the tough questions that won't be asked in the session. (You can bet Stuart et al will filter the questions and none will be taken from the floor. ) Ask them what they've done besides the useless all hands calls to 'edjucate' the sales teams. Have the changed the IT Specialists' PBCs or their FLMs' PBCs? (Didn't think so) Ask them how they've put some skin in the game to attract new customers and shrink the ever growing 'white space'... 2) TPC-C benchmarks. We know that IBM will never do an Informix IDS TPC-C benchmark because IBM does DB2 TPC-C benchmarks. Don't want to open the door to potential FUD. And I can appreciate that. But then there's the TPC-E which I guess all hardware vendors want to avoid a database war so we won't see an IDS TPC-E benchmark either. But that's ok. What's not OK is the fact that IBM hasn't questioned Oracle's pricing of 10g on their latest yet to be audited TPC-C benchmark. Oracle's pricing is pretty impressive. Even with a 28% maintenance tax, Oracle's 3 year price for 10g is still less than half the cost of IDS on the same hardware. But I'm not a guru on pricing and I'm only going from the information posted on the TPC.org's website where Oracle and HP post their detailed information. And of course which is what the El Reg's reporter also read. So where is IBM or one of their Business Partners coming out and saying "Gumby, you're not comparing Apples to Oranges. Oracle's base 10g compares to IDS Express and the prices or X." Or "Gumby, good catch. Looks like Oracle was trying to pull a fast one where they priced out an express version and they didn't price out the full Oracle 10g." 3) Solid. Oh yes. Did you listen in on the Solid and Informix call? I asked a couple of questions off line from Denise. He's the guy who's been supporting Moto going back to the good ol days at Informix. Seems that Solid doesn't do Time Series ("TS"). So the integration with IDS isn't that good for financial or LBS type of work. Not to mention that IBM's new push is the idea of streaming data: (Check out this...) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/10/ibm_system_s_super/ So if you were to do some sort of streaming, you'll of course want to have some form of time series reference. I mean it would be helpful... like if you wanted to stream all of the gold stocks, futures, commodity prices from different markets around the world in real time. Then of course check them against other precious metals... Time Series would be a big help. Too bad Solid doesn't do Time Series, nor does DB2.* Ok, I did a quick google on 'IBM DB2 Time Series Data Type' and found this quote from a 2001 ACM paper... "IBM DB2 for example implements support for time series using data-blades." Here's a link to the abstract: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=375808 And to be fair... I did check IBM's site for 'Time Series' and DB2. Nothing, nada. No information on an IBM extender for time series, except if you look at third party products and even there, the information appears to be out of date. So I guess IBM has lost focus on time series within DB2 and hence since IDS supports TS, I guess it will be a while for Solid to support it. Of course since we're talking about an 'in memory' database, time series doesn't really offer much of a competitive advantage, until you start to look at tying a query in to both Solid and IDS. I think that Kevin Brown should have kept working on his TS and his linkage between shared memory buffering data until it hits the disks. He could have spun it off in to a Solid/TimeTen like in memory database which would have really close links to IDS. In fact, couldn't one also take advantage of the VTI to do this too? (I don't know, I didn't really play with VTI for a couple of reasons.... ;-) But hey! These are just some food for thought. And yeah, I've got to put in the obligatory "But hey! What do I know?" I'm just a guy asking the questions. ;-) -G