Re: Dimmy vs Dumby: who's right? Or, who is more right? :o)

Obnoxio The Clown wrote: > Dimmy, in essence, feels that IBM needs to seed the developer market. > Dumby feels that seeding the developer market is pointless and that IBM > needs to seed the SMB market using IBM salesmen, which means he's using > a different terminology to Dimmy to start with. > > I'm interested in how other people feel about this. Personally, I think > people in the SMB space (real SMB space, not IBM's rather bizarre > definition) want to buy a solution and don't really care about what > database it's running on. So for me, it's all about the developers. What > does everyone else think? I think it's about developers in the main. Or at least it's about what the developers actually end up coding with. Everyone else such as DBAs will then have to support their choice or, in the case of an SMB buying a solution, they'll get and probably be happy with whatever's underneath and maybe buy in support from the supplier. End users sometimes like to have something they're comfortable with, usually it's SQL Server because they can mess about with the system using GUI tools. DBAs don't make DBMS platform decisions and if they did, they would more often than not choose what they're familiar with. Developers just see something that they can code with and get to work somehow and are less concerned about how it might be supported. This is why SQL Server does well despite the fact that for many production scenarios such as decent replication it falls way short but it's DBAs sorting out the mess. All DBAs have seen what can happen when developers are left to configure production systems. The decision on which platform a developer will use will be influenced by many factors but I think the thing that actually frightened senior decision makers a while back was the sense that IBM was encouraging people to migrate to DB2. Had anyone even heard of DB2 outside of the mainframe? Usually senior people are happy to let their developers lead the way, but there are certain times when they will intervene such as this. They can also be influenced by salesmen (Oracle) and if they can sell a few Oracle features, which may well be in Informix but aren't being used by the customer, at the same time as pointing out (rightly or wrongly) that Informix has no future, they're onto a winner. Ben.