Re: DBMS Selection for Terabyte Data Warehouse

On 11 Nov 96 at 21:07, Kurt Lee Harless wrote: > Large fortune 50 company is in the final stages of selecting their DBMS > for enterprise wide Data Warehouse; > > Current candidates are down to ORACLE or INFORMIX... > > Perceptions, Personal Beliefs, Horror Stories, Success Stories...? I reckon either one will do the job, but I think Informix have the edge in that their "vision" of what a database should be is much clearer and better. I spent a year working with Oracle and I found the product to be cumbersome and slow. Their tools were vile. At that stage they were touted as the greatest database (so what's changed? :-) but I didn't find it to be so. Years have passed and Oracle has doubtlessly improved, but Informix has improved immeasurably as well. You will find Informix to be more co-operation based, whereas Oracle tries to take over more. I think this can be seen by the rather bizarre range of products and services Oracle offers. Informix seem to be more focussed. Phil White said recently that he doesn't want Informix to be the biggest software company, but he does want it to be the biggest database company. In South Africa, Oracle said they wouldn't lose a single DW sale. They lost the first major DW sale (and we don't have many!), which is to the best of my knowledge still the largest DW here: it runs on Informix, and it runs like a dream. Informix are very serious about that market - check out the technology in OnLine 8.x XPS, it's built for really big DW's. And it's not just the top-end releases, the whole product range has a coherent and powerful architecture. Parallel processing isn't an option - it's been built into the engine at every possible level. [Climbs off soap box] HTH. -- Ciao, Billy I'd be in favour of apathy, but I just can't get fired up about it...