Re: Informix beats Oracle
Not a technical problem at all — this is a flame-war/advocacy thread arguing whether Informix is a dying "niche" product versus Oracle. DA Morgan posts dice.com job-count tallies putting Informix far behind Oracle, SQL Server and DB2; Andrew Ford mocks the methodology with absurd parallel counts (platforms, cities, sandwich fillings) and notes the searches return false hits for names like Vertica and Cache. Carsten Haese argues the numbers say nothing about pay or job quality. Morgan counters with a salary survey and then bows out. No technical issue and no resolution — just opinions.
Auto-generated by DrWatson from the posts below — may be imperfect; read the full thread.
Data Cruncher wrote: > "DA Morgan" <damorgan@psoug.org> wrote in message > news:1183152041.342174@bubbleator.drizzle.com... >> Data Cruncher wrote: >> >>> I think it is not bad for informix to be in the niche market and not >>> in a commoditised market. >> I could swear I heard someone from WordPerfect say the exact same thing. >> Or was it Lotus. Perhaps it was Philippe Kahn at Borland. Maybe some day >> you'll write a "Where are they now" book and tell us what happened to them >> when they became niche players. > > You are comparing a word processing and a spreadsheet > with an enterprise class RDBMS. You are a bigger idiot > than I thought. Then being an idiot I'll work extra hard to communicate in a language you will understand. Advantage Database Server (www.advantagedatabase.com) Cache' (www.intersystems.com/cache/index.html) EnterpriseDB (www.enterprisedb.com) FoxPro (www.microsoft.com) Ingres (www.ingres.com) InterBase (www.borland.com) Pervasive PSQL (www.pervasive.com) PointBase Embedded, PointBase Micro, PointBase UniSync SQLBase (http://www.unify.com/Products/SQLBase/default.aspx) Vaman DataServer (www.pointbase.com) Vertica (www.vertica.com) Virtuoso Universal Server (www.openlinksw.com/virtuoso) Jobs available at dice.com on 6/29/07 at 10:30pm PDT Oracle 20,351 SQL Server 10,351 DB2 3,384 -------------------- Vertica 816 Informix 438 <======= you are here Cache' 403 Vaman 367 FoxPro 115 -------------------- Pervasive 56 Virtuoso 22 Ingres 20 InterBase 19 Paradox 6 SQLBase 4 EnterpriseDB 2 Advantage 0 PointBase 0 Good news ... you've edged out Cache' and if things continue to improve you'll catch up with Vertica. Welcome to the reality of being a niche market. -- Daniel A. Morgan University of Washington damorgan@x.washington.edu (replace x with u to respond)
Data Cruncher wrote: > "DA Morgan" <damorgan@psoug.org> wrote in message > news:1183152041.342174@bubbleator.drizzle.com... >> Data Cruncher wrote: >> >>> I think it is not bad for informix to be in the niche market and not >>> in a commoditised market. >> I could swear I heard someone from WordPerfect say the exact same thing. >> Or was it Lotus. Perhaps it was Philippe Kahn at Borland. Maybe some day >> you'll write a "Where are they now" book and tell us what happened to >> them >> when they became niche players. > > You are comparing a word processing and a spreadsheet > with an enterprise class RDBMS. You are a bigger idiot > than I thought. Then being an idiot I'll work extra hard to communicate in a language you will understand. Advantage Database Server (www.advantagedatabase.com) Cache' (www.intersystems.com/cache/index.html) EnterpriseDB (www.enterprisedb.com) FoxPro (www.microsoft.com) Ingres (www.ingres.com) InterBase (www.borland.com) Pervasive PSQL (www.pervasive.com) PointBase Embedded, PointBase Micro, PointBase UniSync SQLBase (http://www.unify.com/Products/SQLBase/default.aspx) Vaman DataServer (www.pointbase.com) Vertica (www.vertica.com) Virtuoso Universal Server (www.openlinksw.com/virtuoso) Jobs available at dice.com on 6/29/07 at 10:30pm PDT Oracle 20,351 SQL Server 10,351 DB2 3,384 -------------------- Vertica 816 Informix 438 <======= you are here Cache' 403 Vaman 367 FoxPro 115 -------------------- Pervasive 56 Virtuoso 22 Ingres 20 InterBase 19 Paradox 6 SQLBase 4 EnterpriseDB 2 Advantage 0 PointBase 0 Good news ... you've edged out Cache' and if things continue to improve you'll catch up with Vertica. Welcome to the reality of being a niche market. -- Daniel A. Morgan University of Washington damorgan@x.washington.edu (replace x with u to respond) Jobs on dice.com Windows 15887 Unix 15159 Linux 9596 Mainframe 2373 Contact 14802 San Fransisco 4304 Albany 291 Las Vegas 256 Fish 40 Chicken 8 Beef 3 To ensure I can continue to pay my mortgage, dice.com says I should run Oracle on Windows in Contact, NV while eating a fish sandwhich. Andrew
Data Cruncher wrote: > "DA Morgan" <damorgan@psoug.org> wrote in message > news:1183152041.342174@bubbleator.drizzle.com... >> Data Cruncher wrote: >> >>> I think it is not bad for informix to be in the niche market and not >>> in a commoditised market. >> I could swear I heard someone from WordPerfect say the exact same thing. >> Or was it Lotus. Perhaps it was Philippe Kahn at Borland. Maybe some day >> you'll write a "Where are they now" book and tell us what happened to >> them >> when they became niche players. > > You are comparing a word processing and a spreadsheet > with an enterprise class RDBMS. You are a bigger idiot > than I thought. Then being an idiot I'll work extra hard to communicate in a language you will understand. Advantage Database Server (www.advantagedatabase.com) Cache' (www.intersystems.com/cache/index.html) EnterpriseDB (www.enterprisedb.com) FoxPro (www.microsoft.com) Ingres (www.ingres.com) InterBase (www.borland.com) Pervasive PSQL (www.pervasive.com) PointBase Embedded, PointBase Micro, PointBase UniSync SQLBase (http://www.unify.com/Products/SQLBase/default.aspx) Vaman DataServer (www.pointbase.com) Vertica (www.vertica.com) Virtuoso Universal Server (www.openlinksw.com/virtuoso) Jobs available at dice.com on 6/29/07 at 10:30pm PDT Oracle 20,351 SQL Server 10,351 DB2 3,384 -------------------- Vertica 816 Informix 438 <======= you are here Cache' 403 Vaman 367 FoxPro 115 -------------------- Pervasive 56 Virtuoso 22 Ingres 20 InterBase 19 Paradox 6 SQLBase 4 EnterpriseDB 2 Advantage 0 PointBase 0 Good news ... you've edged out Cache' and if things continue to improve you'll catch up with Vertica. Welcome to the reality of being a niche market. -- Daniel A. Morgan University of Washington damorgan@x.washington.edu (replace x with u to respond) _______________________________________________ It is also worth noting that a search for vertica on dice.com hits on vertical and a search on "vertica" returns 0 hits, a search on vaman returns lots of results that don't contain vaman and "vaman" returns 0 hits and cache is a pretty common technology term that is also hitting on storage cache, etc. Andrew
Andrew Ford wrote: > Jobs on dice.com > Windows 15887 > Unix 15159 > Linux 9596 > Mainframe 2373 > Contact 14802 > San Fransisco 4304 > Albany 291 > Las Vegas 256 > Fish 40 > Chicken 8 > Beef 3 > To ensure I can continue to pay my mortgage, dice.com says I should > run Oracle on Windows in Contact, NV while eating a fish sandwhich. > Andrew I get that kind of fuzzy thinking in my classes sometimes too though not very often. Try using the "AND" operator. www.dice.com search for "oracle" AND "unix" ...... 6,143 jobs search for "oracle" AND "windows" ... 3,274 jobs search for "oracle" AND "linux" ..... 2,781 jobs The inference you drew was roughly equivalent to asking "Why does a mouse when it spins." Though it appears you would do far better career wise running Oracle on Windows in Contact Nevada while eating a fish sandwich than some other RDBMS. So you might want to consider that rather than a career as a logician. search for "oracle" AND "windows" AND "fish" = 2 jobs but neither one is in Contact Nevada. Sorry: No jobs for "Informix" AND "fish" on any platform or operating system in any city. <g> -- Daniel A. Morgan University of Washington damorgan@x.washington.edu (replace x with u to respond)
On Sat, 2007-06-30 at 08:13 -0700, DA Morgan wrote: > Andrew Ford wrote: > > > Jobs on dice.com > > Windows 15887 > > Unix 15159 > > Linux 9596 > > Mainframe 2373 > > > Contact 14802 > > San Fransisco 4304 > > Albany 291 > > Las Vegas 256 > > > Fish 40 > > Chicken 8 > > Beef 3 > > > To ensure I can continue to pay my mortgage, dice.com says I should > > run Oracle on Windows in Contact, NV while eating a fish sandwhich. > > > Andrew > > I get that kind of fuzzy thinking in my classes sometimes too though > not very often. Try using the "AND" operator. > > www.dice.com > search for "oracle" AND "unix" ...... 6,143 jobs > search for "oracle" AND "windows" ... 3,274 jobs > search for "oracle" AND "linux" ..... 2,781 jobs Congratulations for completely missing Andrew's point. He was bringing up meaningless statistics to show you how meaningless your own statistics are. Your statistics say nothing about the quality of pay, the quality of the posted jobs, and job security. Your numbers merely prove that Oracle is more ubiquitous than Informix, but we already knew that. -- Carsten Haese http://informixdb.sourceforge.net
Carsten Haese wrote: > Congratulations for completely missing Andrew's point. He was bringing > up meaningless statistics to show you how meaningless your own > statistics are. > > Your statistics say nothing about the quality of pay, the quality of the > posted jobs, and job security. Your numbers merely prove that Oracle is > more ubiquitous than Informix, but we already knew that. I didn't miss his point ... I responded in-kind. You are absolutely correct about quality of pay and such. No job placement will ever give you that information nor will most interviews. Generally one learns the answers about quality and job security when things go terribly wrong ... or otherwise. Search for DBA: http://uk.hudson.com/documents/uk-it-salary-survey.pdf Everywhere I looked Informix salaries lagged behind those of others comparable professionals. Feel better now? I sure do. But quite honestly I think we've beaten this thread into the dust and now are accomplishing little so I'm moving on. But fear not ... I'll be lurking and learning. Thank you, again, to those who helped me learn a little more about today's Informix IDS. -- Daniel A. Morgan University of Washington damorgan@x.washington.edu (replace x with u to respond)