Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

[Rhino]

One of my friends, Scott, is a consultant who doesn't currently have
newsgroup access so I am asking these questions for him. I'll be telling him
how to monitor the answers via Google Newsgroup searches.

Scott has heard a lot of hype about DB2 and Oracle and is trying to
understand the pros and cons of each product. I'm quite familiar with DB2
but have never used Oracle so I can't make any meaningful comparisons for
him. He does not have a lot of database background but sometimes has to
choose or recommend a database to his clients.

Scott has enough life-experience to take the marketing information produced
by IBM and Oracle with a grain of salt and would like to hear from real
DBAs, especially ones who are fluent with both products, for their views on
two questions:

1. What are the pros and cons of the current releases of DB2 and Oracle?

2. What other sources of *independent* information are available to help
someone new to databases choose between DB2 and Oracle?

This is *not* a troll and we don't want to start a flame war! Scott just
want some honest facts to help him decide which product is best at which
jobs.

--
Rhino

[michael newport]

DA Morgan <da******@x.was hington.edu> wrote in message news:<109875222 6.378168@yasure >...

michael newport wrote:

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.

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 ?

[HansF]

michael newport wrote:

HansF <ne*******@telu s.net> wrote in message
news:<_68fd.2$d f2.0@edtnps89>. ..

michael newport wrote:

>
> So why buy Oracle when Ingres is free.

If you use Oracle like you use Ingres, you are absolutely correct.

Its just a database. You use it as you need to, to do your job.
See previous post for comparisons on how to do this.

The implication is that accounting and shareholders or stakeholders (or
wife) have not had a review of where time and money are going. Which is
more toward keeping old technology alive than improving the business.

Human.

Which makes me worry about management and the viability of the
organization. (Suggest you keep your resume polished ...)

Human.

What you consider Human, I consider time diverted _from_ Human activity such
as spending time with my wife and family. Instead, I'd be coding to
account for those pieces missing. After all, per your previous post it's
just a database, so we wouldn't want to get any benefit from that would we?

Been there, done that. Prefer the family.

Of course, you _could_ use Oracle the same way as Ingres and code the
solution in PERL or otherwise. But my wife prefers I send time with her
instead of the computer, and these days I prefer to listen to the CDs
than
to code the catalog. (I listened when they said 'get a life' <g>)

Yes Ingres has changed significantly in the last 7 years.
It is also free.
That is $400 dollars saved.
Now imagine if you were a large company.

Totally forgetting the cost of programming and maintenance again, aren't
you? Selective memory and bad logic don't make the added time and cost of
unnecessary development go away. And a big company needs to pay it's
people.

Remember that the run-on cost of development and maintenance kills many more
projects than the cost of purchased software or hardware. Which gets
people fired. Which, I guess is Human as well.

And yet, I do understand what you are saying. Having used both
OpenOffice.org and MS Office, I have never needed the full capability of MS
Word or Excel and have standardized my home and business on OO.org.
There's nothing missing, so I don't need to code for the stuff I'm missing.
In such an environment iff it's been properly thought out, go for 'good
enough'. (And remember MySQL & PostgreSQL!)

Note that I'm also a big believer in FOSS. All my personal and corp
machines, except one, are GNU/Linux based. Allows me to put the money and
effort where it belongs. Which I can only do by careful, not religious,
analysis.

And IMO, based on my analysis, Ingres is behind the times in the commercial
rdbms market, and (although it has a few decent capabilities) behind the
times in the FOSS market as well. My prediction is that the MySQL group
will look at the capabilities and legally subsume the good stuff, to add it
to the already superior product.
I suspect you are going to respond and, since I have a family to get back
to, that means you will get the last word. Make it a good one. Then you
can get back to your religion (and spend your time coding). <g>

/Hans

[Yukonkid]

"Rhino" <rh****@NOSPAM. sympatico.ca> wrote in message news:<33******* **********@news 20.bellglobal.c om>...

One of my friends, Scott, is a consultant who doesn't currently have
newsgroup access so I am asking these questions for him. I'll be telling him
how to monitor the answers via Google Newsgroup searches.

Scott has heard a lot of hype about DB2 and Oracle and is trying to
understand the pros and cons of each product. I'm quite familiar with DB2
but have never used Oracle so I can't make any meaningful comparisons for
him. He does not have a lot of database background but sometimes has to
choose or recommend a database to his clients.

Scott has enough life-experience to take the marketing information produced
by IBM and Oracle with a grain of salt and would like to hear from real
DBAs, especially ones who are fluent with both products, for their views on
two questions:

1. What are the pros and cons of the current releases of DB2 and Oracle?

2. What other sources of *independent* information are available to help
someone new to databases choose between DB2 and Oracle?

This is *not* a troll and we don't want to start a flame war! Scott just
want some honest facts to help him decide which product is best at which
jobs.

Hi,

without going into much religious talking, ask yourself:

How many OS versions of DB2 are on the market?
How many OS versions of Oracle?

For DB2 you find different databases for quite every platform (OS 390,
UNIX, AIX, mainframe...) - name it. For every problem they have a
database - incompatible between each other...
In Oracle you deal with the same architecture on every OS platform
they support.

Some of the things I like in Oracle

* a lot of features to select from (Oracles index types i.e.)
* the shared sql approach
* multi-versioning and read consistency implementation (SELECT without
being blocked by writes i.e.)

yk


at least, all databases return the data that you store,

[Serge Rielau]

Argh.... I finally break radio silence here....

Yukonkid wrote:

For DB2 you find different databases for quite every platform (OS 390,
UNIX, AIX, mainframe...) - name it. For every problem they have a
database - incompatible between each other...

OS390 < mainframe
AIX < Unix..
do you know what you are talking about?

There are three code bases:
DB2 for Linux, Unix, Windows
DB2 for z/OS
DB2 for AS/400

Oracle does not exist on AS/400 (through no fault of it's own...)
Oracle does virtually not exist on z/OS (low single digit market share,
could it be a separate codebase is required to be successful? ;-))

So if you want to deploy on i/Series or z/Series you look at DB2 and
ONLY DB2. No Oracle in the game.

If you want to deploy _anywhere_else_ DB2 competes with exactly _one_
codebase:
DB2 for Linux, Unix, Windows

Cheers
Serge

[HansF]

michael newport wrote:

And do not forget, Oracle will charge you for a licence, this is ongoing.

Aaah ... the ongoing license fee myth! (#83?) Sadly incorrect, just as your
other myths.
Oracle charges once for a perpetual license. An Oracle license allows you to
use it forever if you wish (which is why there are still sites using
Oracle6).
You can, if you wish, get support for a license. That is annual, and
provides unlimited support calls. Quite different from licensing.

<heavy sigh>

[Joel Garry]

mi************@ yahoo.com (michael newport) wrote in message news:<63******* *************** ***@posting.goo gle.com>...

DA Morgan <da******@x.was hington.edu> wrote in message news:<109875219 3.942650@yasure >...

michael newport wrote:

I am now (1 year) working with Oracle and my work involves doing the
same stuff that I did with Ingres (see previous post).

Well, you need to get more experience with new stuff. Doing the same
thing over in a different environment should give you an increased
appreciation of what you are doing, and what you could be doing.

That's not the fault of the product. That direct and proximate
responsibility 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.

I do recall one banking customer had a problem because their currency
was so inflated Ingres couldn't handle the number of bits in the
numbers.
But technology for its own sake is a waste of money.

I would agree with that, except out of all the useless flak sometimes
a gem comes, and sometimes a critical mass is created to actually
improve things.

jg
--
@home.com is bogus.
Did I say critical mass?
http://www.nuclearspace.com.nyud.net...sview_FINX.htm

[HansF]

JEDIDIAH wrote:

These products have a reason for being because each product represents
a specialization in it's own right. If given the choice between a
specialist product such as MQ over some element of Oracle bundleware, I
would be inclined to go for the IBM product simply because I know that I
can count on it to be a discrete component that isn't going to be
unecessarily tied to another Oracle product.

LOL.

I have been called in after-the-fact in several situations that took that
attitude. (By the way - WebSphere has subsumed MQ Series. You were saying
about Bundleware?)

In each and every case, vendor's response was "well it wouldn't happen if
you used 'our' DB".

In each and every case, the solution was to take advantage of the selected
DB's capabilities instead of reinventing a bolt-on.

And in each and every case, the customer paid heavily for the software - in
one case they added $10M to the bill to have 'vendor X's queueing solution'
instead of using the freely supplied Oracle AQ (which did the same thing).

Smart - wot?

If YOUR organization has extra money to do these kinds of things, please let
me know. I have a few unnecessary solutions I could recommend.

'nuff said!
/Hans

[Yukonkid]

"Rhino" <rh****@NOSPAM. sympatico.ca> wrote in message news:<33******* **********@news 20.bellglobal.c om>...

One of my friends, Scott, is a consultant who doesn't currently have
newsgroup access so I am asking these questions for him. I'll be telling him
how to monitor the answers via Google Newsgroup searches.

Scott has heard a lot of hype about DB2 and Oracle and is trying to
understand the pros and cons of each product. I'm quite familiar with DB2
but have never used Oracle so I can't make any meaningful comparisons for
him. He does not have a lot of database background but sometimes has to
choose or recommend a database to his clients.

Scott has enough life-experience to take the marketing information produced
by IBM and Oracle with a grain of salt and would like to hear from real
DBAs, especially ones who are fluent with both products, for their views on
two questions:

1. What are the pros and cons of the current releases of DB2 and Oracle?

2. What other sources of *independent* information are available to help
someone new to databases choose between DB2 and Oracle?

This is *not* a troll and we don't want to start a flame war! Scott just
want some honest facts to help him decide which product is best at which
jobs.

Hi,

without going into much religious talking, ask yourself:

How many OS versions of DB2 are on the market?
How many OS versions of Oracle?

For DB2 you find different databases for quite every platform (OS 390,
UNIX, AIX, mainframe...) - name it. For every problem they have a
database - incompatible between each other...
In Oracle you deal with the same architecture on every OS platform
they support.

Some of the things I like in Oracle

* a lot of features to select from (Oracles index types i.e.)
* the shared sql approach
* multi-versioning and read consistency implementation (SELECT without
being blocked by writes i.e.)

yk


at least, all databases return the data that you store,

[michael newport]

I have a free database that I can recommend.

Ingres.

Regards

Michael Newport

[michael newport]

> Well, you need to get more experience with new stuff. Doing the same

thing over in a different environment should give you an increased
appreciation of what you are doing, and what you could be doing.
It did, and the similarities were all too obvious.

That's not the fault of the product. That direct and proximate
responsibility 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.

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.
I do recall one banking customer had a problem because their currency
was so inflated Ingres couldn't handle the number of bits in the
numbers.

But technology for its own sake is a waste of money.

I would agree with that, except out of all the useless flak sometimes
a gem comes, and sometimes a critical mass is created to actually
improve things.

jg

Well here is a gem and its free.

Regards
Michael Newport