Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

[michael newport]

Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

Serge,

I already did an oracle vs ingres thread but was disappointed with the
answers that I received.

Please notice that I only commented on databases that I have
experience of,
unlike our favourite troll Mr.Morgan who has a problem with anything
not spelt Oracle.

Regards
Michael Newport

[Darin McBride]

Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

DA Morgan wrote:
[color=blue][color=green]
>> You can, if you wish, get support for a license. That is annual, and
>> provides unlimited support calls. Quite different from licensing.
>>
>> <heavy sigh>[/color]
>
> When the facts don't support a position it is not uncommon to have
> pseudofacts invented.[/color]

To be really fair, this is just nitpicking on the semantics. To most
people, "licensing" really means "total cost payable to the vendor."
If I must buy an annual support contract to ensure the product's
success in my environment, that's the same thing, at the end of the
day - money going from my company to Oracle, IBM, MS, CA, whatever.

Most of the thread arguing against Ingres has talked vaguely about a
"total cost" of ownership - and the one time Michael has a valid point
about the vendor portion of that TCO (which, of course, does not
validate anything else he says), you go and nitpick his terminology.

Then again, perhaps it's not uncommon that when your opponent is
generally making no sense, that you stop reading his posts objectively,
and just assume that the whole argument is absurd, rather than just the
individual (and overwhelming) portions of it that really are absurd?

[HansF]

Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

Darin McBride wrote:
[color=blue]
>
> To be really fair, this is just nitpicking on the semantics. To most
> people, "licensing" really means "total cost payable to the vendor."
> If I must buy an annual support contract to ensure the product's
> success in my environment, that's the same thing, at the end of the
> day - money going from my company to Oracle, IBM, MS, CA, whatever.[/color]

You seem to separate vendor cost from internal cost.

The implication is that any development costs or maintenance costs resulting
from inventing software to compensate for capabilities not in Ingres are
not to be counted, but paying Oracle or IBM for those same capabilities are
to be counted. I'd be concerned about that style of accounting - it's
quite reminiscient of the CapEx vs OpEx accounting invented to get around
regulations in some industries.

No matter which way we try to wiggle, companies need to manage total cost,
not just "total cost payable to the vendor." The proof is in the attempts
at outsourcing - whether it works well (or works at all) is irrelevant, the
relevance is that companies are doing this (in desparation?) to get total
costs under control.



However, as Serge says, this thread is WAY off topic and no longer relevant.
If you want to continue this discussion, I suggest we go to some Ingres or
open source advocacy group. I hereby stop responding to the Ingres and
Open Source discussion in this thread and apologize to all for not having
stopped sooner.

/Hans

[michael newport]

Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

> Then again, perhaps it's not uncommon that when your opponent is[color=blue]
> generally making no sense, that you stop reading his posts objectively,
> and just assume that the whole argument is absurd, rather than just the
> individual (and overwhelming) portions of it that really are absurd?[/color]

which bit did you have trouble with ?

[michael newport]

Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

Jean-David Beyer <jdbeyer@exit10 9.com> wrote in message news:<10nvljud6 hsat7f@corp.sup ernews.com>...[color=blue]
> michael newport wrote:[color=green][color=darkred]
> >>Well, you need to get more experience with new stuff. Doing the same
> >>thing over in a different environment should give you an increased
> >>appreciatio n of what you are doing, and what you could be doing.[/color]
> >
> >
> > It did, and the similarities were all too obvious.
> >
> >[color=darkred]
> >>>>That's not the fault of the product. That direct and proximate
> >>>>responsibil ity falls on you for being a dinosaur. How much code have
> >>>>you implemented with bulk binding? How much with the model clause?
> >>>>How much with analytic functions? How many materialized views with
> >>>>refresh logs?
> >>>
> >>>its answers the users needs.
> >>>and it was written by the dealine.
> >>>which meant my company got paid.
> >>>although some of this money was then sent to Oracle to pay for the
> >>>licence.
> >>>if we had used Ingres we could have done the same job for less, or
> >>>increased our profits.
> >>
> >>I used to work for a vendor of a product that worked on multiple
> >>databases, including Ingres. They dropped Ingres support due to lack
> >>of interest from potential customers. Are you sure whoever paid your
> >>company would have been interested with Ingres? Many products are
> >>considered more desireable simply because they are more expensive.
> >>Stupid, true, but the way of the world.[/color]
> >
> >
> > I agree that CA sales and marketing were bad. But Ingres the product is not.
> > CA also wasted time and money on speculative products like Jasmine and Opal.
> > Linux / Apache / PHP have taken off because they are reliable and OpenSource.
> > I predict the same for Ingres.
> >[/color]
> I would be curious what the advantages of Ingres might be over other free
> (depending on exact usage) dbms's such as postgreSQL and MySQL. I know
> that Ingres has been around since even before Oracle existed (late
> 1970s?). I suppose postgreSQL is a descendant of Ingres.
>
> For desktop use, it probably matters little, though after fussing around
> with a bunch of them, I chose to pay IBM for their DB2 UDB because it just
> plain worked better and they seemed to follow standards (such as for
> Embedded SQL) better than did Informix or postgreSQL did at the time I
> tried them (mid to late 1990s).[/color]


Open Source is good, and not just Ingres.
But I used Ingres for a long time, and I know it works.
Oracle also works but costs a lot of money.

I also read that IBM and Sybase appear to be going opensource.

[Darin McBride]

Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

michael newport wrote:
[color=blue][color=green]
>> Then again, perhaps it's not uncommon that when your opponent is
>> generally making no sense, that you stop reading his posts objectively,
>> and just assume that the whole argument is absurd, rather than just the
>> individual (and overwhelming) portions of it that really are absurd?[/color]
>
> which bit did you have trouble with ?[/color]

The lack of "T" in your "TCO".

I mean, there are many different costs in owning software. Not just
the initial cost.

1. Purchase cost.

This is what you seem to be focusing on. Unfortunately, it's not the
total cost. For most larger databases, it isn't even always a
significant portion of the total cost.

2. Support costs.

This, with #1, is what you pay to the vendor, and often significantly
outweighs the purchase cost. Sure, Ingres may be free to "purchase",
but what about support costs if/when something goes wrong?

At one time, support came free with purchase. Nowadays, it is swinging
heavily in the other direction, especially with commodity (read: open
source) software. The cost of 24/7 within-the-hour support is
significant, but so is its peace of mind.

3. Development costs.

This is what the purchaser spends to integrate the software into their
infrastructure. This may be a lonely IT tech in a closet somewhere
figuring out how to get the software installed, or it may be an entire
software development engineering team with a few DBAs trying to
architect their business model inside the database. Generally
speaking, this outweighs both #1 and #2 together.

If, then, the database product provides functions, stored procedures,
and other database-isms ("Oracle-isms" or "DB2-isms" for the newsgroups
getting this cross-posted) which save you 2 weeks of development time
in the pursuit of your business goals, right there you've saved a
significant portion of your purchase cost of any of the "expensive"
database vendors. I know that 2 weeks of my time is worth way more
than $400 - although I suspect most DB2 or Oracle deployments cost more
than $400 in purchase costs. Even with $20,000 in purchase costs, if
it saves me 4 weeks in development time, and a corresponding 1-2 weeks
in testing time (since I shouldn't need to debug that function - IBM or
Oracle have already done that for me), I've saved a significant portion
of that purchase cost... at least if I'm contracting. And we get to
market (deployment) 5-6 weeks earlier. If this new database
application is supposed to save the whole corporation 1 hour of work
per person per month, and there are 1000 employees, that's 1250-1500
hours saved in those extra 5-6 weeks, and it only takes an average of
$10/hour to pay for the rest of the purchase price of $20,000. In
other words, the "purchase price" is FREE at the point where the
application would be deployed if I didn't have those extra built-in
functions.

And it's this last area that you seem to keep ignoring. I don't think
it's me who is having trouble with the thread...

[Serge Rielau]

Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

michael newport wrote:[color=blue]
> I also read that IBM and Sybase appear to be going opensource.[/color]
IBM is a company, not a product.
IBM Cloudscape has been open sourced as "Derby".
There aren't even rumours that IBM may open source one of it's
mainstream commercial RDBMS (DB2, IDS, XPS and RedBrick)

Cheers
Serge

[michael newport]

Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

> 2. Support costs.[color=blue]
>
> This, with #1, is what you pay to the vendor, and often significantly
> outweighs the purchase cost. Sure, Ingres may be free to "purchase",
> but what about support costs if/when something goes wrong?
>
> At one time, support came free with purchase. Nowadays, it is swinging
> heavily in the other direction, especially with commodity (read: open
> source) software. The cost of 24/7 within-the-hour support is
> significant, but so is its peace of mind.[/color]

I agree support costs money.
But this is not product dependent.
It depends on the support you need.

Mature products give you peace of mind, and Ingres has a long history.
[color=blue]
> 3. Development costs.
>
> This is what the purchaser spends to integrate the software into their
> infrastructure. This may be a lonely IT tech in a closet somewhere
> figuring out how to get the software installed, or it may be an entire
> software development engineering team with a few DBAs trying to
> architect their business model inside the database. Generally
> speaking, this outweighs both #1 and #2 together.
>
> If, then, the database product provides functions, stored procedures,
> and other database-isms ("Oracle-isms" or "DB2-isms" for the newsgroups
> getting this cross-posted) which save you 2 weeks of development time
> in the pursuit of your business goals, right there you've saved a
> significant portion of your purchase cost of any of the "expensive"
> database vendors. I know that 2 weeks of my time is worth way more
> than $400 - although I suspect most DB2 or Oracle deployments cost more
> than $400 in purchase costs. Even with $20,000 in purchase costs, if
> it saves me 4 weeks in development time, and a corresponding 1-2 weeks
> in testing time (since I shouldn't need to debug that function - IBM or
> Oracle have already done that for me), I've saved a significant portion
> of that purchase cost... at least if I'm contracting. And we get to
> market (deployment) 5-6 weeks earlier. If this new database
> application is supposed to save the whole corporation 1 hour of work
> per person per month, and there are 1000 employees, that's 1250-1500
> hours saved in those extra 5-6 weeks, and it only takes an average of
> $10/hour to pay for the rest of the purchase price of $20,000. In
> other words, the "purchase price" is FREE at the point where the
> application would be deployed if I didn't have those extra built-in
> functions.
>
> And it's this last area that you seem to keep ignoring. I don't think
> it's me who is having trouble with the thread...[/color]

Again, these costs are entirely dependent on people, not product.

More importantly OpenSource software is yours to change.

[michael newport]

Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

Serge,

would you like to see these other IBM products OpenSourced ?

Regards
Michael Newport

[michael newport]

Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

> >>michael newport wrote:[color=blue][color=green][color=darkred]
> >>
> >>
> >>>Daniel,
> >>>
> >>>what do you do at the University of Washington ?
> >>>
> >>>nothing to do with education ?
> >>>
> >>>Regards
> >>>Michael Newport
> >>
> >>Teach databases something that might have interested you
> >>once in your life.[/color]
> >
> >
> > I am still interested, which is why we are having this discussion.
> > But rather than back a product because it has a particular brand,
> > I prefer a more realistic discussion of experience.
> >
> > Have you ever used Ingres ?[/color]
>
> I don't "back" a product. I work routinely in multiple products. That
> I teach one relates to what the university's students want ... not what
> I do.
>
> But no one wants to learn Ingres. It is a decaying corpse that CA has
> attempted to bury at sea. If you want to work with a real open-source
> database the clear choice is MySQL.[/color]

So you have never used Ingres.

I guess the OpenSource tide brought Ingres back to shore.

Why is the clear choice MySQL ?

[Noons]

Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

"Jim Kennedy" <kennedy-downwithspammer sfamily@attbi.n et> wrote in message news:<Tzifd.680 2$HA.6215@attbi _s01>...
[color=blue]
> If this is the same Ingres I used awhile ago I wouldn't touch it with a ten
> foot pole even if you paid me. The concurrency model sucks, start a
> transaction, insert a record, lock 95% of the table if it has a primary
> key - because the page locks on the index locks most of the pages. NO ONE
> ELSE COULD GET ANY WORK DONE, unless you threw out the transaction model and
> went to auto commit. POS.[/color]

The very same POS. That got shafted out of the market
PRECISELY because of the crap it always was.
Did you ever try crashing the server? Best way to ensure
you lost all your work, with Ingres.

[Serge Rielau]

Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

You are asking me whether I want to be fired from my current job.
I currenly own a good portion of DB2 for LUW's SQL Compiler code.
For sure I'm not in it for the charitable work although it sometimes
feels like it.

Cheers
Serge

[Darin McBride]

Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

michael newport wrote:
[color=blue][color=green]
>> 2. Support costs.
>>
>> This, with #1, is what you pay to the vendor, and often significantly
>> outweighs the purchase cost. Sure, Ingres may be free to "purchase",
>> but what about support costs if/when something goes wrong?
>>
>> At one time, support came free with purchase. Nowadays, it is swinging
>> heavily in the other direction, especially with commodity (read: open
>> source) software. The cost of 24/7 within-the-hour support is
>> significant, but so is its peace of mind.[/color]
>
> I agree support costs money.
> But this is not product dependent.
> It depends on the support you need.
>
> Mature products give you peace of mind, and Ingres has a long history.[/color]

Not quite - unchanging products give you peace of mind - as long as new
features are added, things can break.
[color=blue][color=green]
>> 3. Development costs.
>>
>> This is what the purchaser spends to integrate the software into their
>> infrastructure. This may be a lonely IT tech in a closet somewhere
>> figuring out how to get the software installed, or it may be an entire
>> software development engineering team with a few DBAs trying to
>> architect their business model inside the database. Generally
>> speaking, this outweighs both #1 and #2 together.
>>
>> If, then, the database product provides functions, stored procedures,
>> and other database-isms ("Oracle-isms" or "DB2-isms" for the newsgroups
>> getting this cross-posted) which save you 2 weeks of development time
>> in the pursuit of your business goals, right there you've saved a
>> significant portion of your purchase cost of any of the "expensive"
>> database vendors. I know that 2 weeks of my time is worth way more
>> than $400 - although I suspect most DB2 or Oracle deployments cost more
>> than $400 in purchase costs. Even with $20,000 in purchase costs, if
>> it saves me 4 weeks in development time, and a corresponding 1-2 weeks
>> in testing time (since I shouldn't need to debug that function - IBM or
>> Oracle have already done that for me), I've saved a significant portion
>> of that purchase cost... at least if I'm contracting. And we get to
>> market (deployment) 5-6 weeks earlier. If this new database
>> application is supposed to save the whole corporation 1 hour of work
>> per person per month, and there are 1000 employees, that's 1250-1500
>> hours saved in those extra 5-6 weeks, and it only takes an average of
>> $10/hour to pay for the rest of the purchase price of $20,000. In
>> other words, the "purchase price" is FREE at the point where the
>> application would be deployed if I didn't have those extra built-in
>> functions.
>>
>> And it's this last area that you seem to keep ignoring. I don't think
>> it's me who is having trouble with the thread...[/color]
>
> Again, these costs are entirely dependent on people, not product.
>
> More importantly OpenSource software is yours to change.[/color]

Ok, I see where you're coming from now. But I think you missed
something. If I use a smaller product, such as Ingres, which doesn't
have a function which takes me 4 weeks to implement, vs using Oracle or
DB2 or MSSQL (big three) which does have that function, saving me, in
effect, 4 weeks of development, then the "pricey" database just cost me
nothing - the costs and the savings cancel each other out.

Small, stable vendor means reinventing the wheel on many projects.

[michael newport]

Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

> Not quite - unchanging products give you peace of mind - as long as new[color=blue]
> features are added, things can break.[/color]

Test plans are often overlooked, but this is people dependent.
[color=blue]
>[color=green][color=darkred]
> >> 3. Development costs.
> >>
> >> This is what the purchaser spends to integrate the software into their
> >> infrastructure. This may be a lonely IT tech in a closet somewhere
> >> figuring out how to get the software installed, or it may be an entire
> >> software development engineering team with a few DBAs trying to
> >> architect their business model inside the database. Generally
> >> speaking, this outweighs both #1 and #2 together.
> >>
> >> If, then, the database product provides functions, stored procedures,
> >> and other database-isms ("Oracle-isms" or "DB2-isms" for the newsgroups
> >> getting this cross-posted) which save you 2 weeks of development time
> >> in the pursuit of your business goals, right there you've saved a
> >> significant portion of your purchase cost of any of the "expensive"
> >> database vendors. I know that 2 weeks of my time is worth way more
> >> than $400 - although I suspect most DB2 or Oracle deployments cost more
> >> than $400 in purchase costs. Even with $20,000 in purchase costs, if
> >> it saves me 4 weeks in development time, and a corresponding 1-2 weeks
> >> in testing time (since I shouldn't need to debug that function - IBM or
> >> Oracle have already done that for me), I've saved a significant portion
> >> of that purchase cost... at least if I'm contracting. And we get to
> >> market (deployment) 5-6 weeks earlier. If this new database
> >> application is supposed to save the whole corporation 1 hour of work
> >> per person per month, and there are 1000 employees, that's 1250-1500
> >> hours saved in those extra 5-6 weeks, and it only takes an average of
> >> $10/hour to pay for the rest of the purchase price of $20,000. In
> >> other words, the "purchase price" is FREE at the point where the
> >> application would be deployed if I didn't have those extra built-in
> >> functions.
> >>
> >> And it's this last area that you seem to keep ignoring. I don't think
> >> it's me who is having trouble with the thread...[/color]
> >
> > Again, these costs are entirely dependent on people, not product.
> >
> > More importantly OpenSource software is yours to change.[/color]
>
> Ok, I see where you're coming from now. But I think you missed
> something. If I use a smaller product, such as Ingres, which doesn't
> have a function which takes me 4 weeks to implement, vs using Oracle or
> DB2 or MSSQL (big three) which does have that function, saving me, in
> effect, 4 weeks of development, then the "pricey" database just cost me
> nothing - the costs and the savings cancel each other out.
>
> Small, stable vendor means reinventing the wheel on many projects.[/color]

Are you thinking of a particular function ?

I was forced to use Oracle report server (paid for) but found it to be
very buggy, so I had to 'reinvent' some functionality using utl file
and Unix.

When you say big 3, do you mean by market share ?

[michael newport]

Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

DA Morgan <damorgan@x.was hington.edu> wrote in message news:<109892813 0.887686@yasure >...[color=blue]
> michael newport wrote:
>[color=green][color=darkred]
> >>Linux, Apache and PHP are succesful because there is a strong developer
> >>and user community. Ingres doesn't have this, and making something
> >>OpenSource doesn't cause this community to automatically build.[/color]
> >
> >
> > Linux, Apache and PHP did not start off successful. They grew.
> >
> > Ingres has existed for a long time, the base IS there
> > comp.databases. ingres[/color]
>
> The "base" is database developers not people that write kernel code in
> C. They will all die of old age before they figure out how to give the
> Ingres kernel capabilities that were in Oracle 8i.
>[color=green][color=darkred]
> >>Linux in particular benefited from the focus companies like Oracle, IBM
> >>and others placed on it. The same level of focus is unlikely to happen
> >>for Ingres.[/color]
> >
> >
> > Companies focus on Linux because it is free. A huge advantage.[/color]
>
> Nonsense. Absolute ignorant nonsense. I consult for a division of The
> Boeing company. The cost of an operating system compared to the total
> cost of an application is so small as to be invisible. Do you really
> think we are going to build a $15,000,000 system and worry about the
> lousy few hundred or few thousand dollars for the O/S?
>
> We chose Linux because it gave us better performance, in lab tests with
> our application than did Win2K, WinXP, Solaris 2.9 and HP/UX 11i.[/color]

and the reason that Linux exists is that it answers a market need !
people are fed up of paying licence fee's for bloatware.

and as you say yourself a free product can give better performance
than its expensively licenced rivals !!