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

[DA Morgan]

HansF wrote:

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).

Actually Boeing still has two Apollo server with Oracle 5. And still on
the original license.
You can, if you wish, get support for a license. That is annual, and
provides unlimited support calls. Quite different from licensing.

<heavy sigh>

When the facts don't support a position it is not uncommon to have
pseudofacts invented.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
University of Washington
da******@x.wash ington.edu
(replace 'x' with 'u' to respond)

[DA Morgan]

michael newport wrote:

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.

And exactly why doesn't your "critical" understanding of the marketplace
indicate anything about MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, and all of the
other open-source code bases? You are a religious zealot pushing
neolithic technology likely because it is all you know.

There is not a chance in 1000 that it will ever have 1/2 the marketshare
of MySQL which is the only serious open-source competitor to Oracle and
DB2.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
University of Washington
da******@x.wash ington.edu
(replace 'x' with 'u' to respond)

[DA Morgan]

michael newport wrote:

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.

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

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.

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.

Companies focus on Linux because it is free. A huge advantage.

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.

You really are out of touch with reality.
Oh and by the way Ingres is also free.

Oh and by the way ... we really don't give a damn. And neither
does anyone else.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
University of Washington
da******@x.wash ington.edu
(replace 'x' with 'u' to respond)

[DA Morgan]

Serge Rielau wrote:

Michael,

This thread is now very much off topic.
Comparison between Oracle and Ingres should be in these respective
newsgroups if you insist on having these debates.
I don't see where comp.databases. ibm-db2 is relevant here.

Cheers
Serge

I agree. I am kill-filing this thread. Newport is just trolling and I
am tired of responding to a neolithic fanatic. You'll so no more on
this from me.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
University of Washington
da******@x.wash ington.edu
(replace 'x' with 'u' to respond)

[michael newport]

> Not once in this entire thread have Oracle Report Server (it doesn't

even exist any more) or JAVA been part of any post. Don't try to change
the subject. That is a activity best left to small children.
Daniel,

in Ingres I wrote 4GL, in Oracle I write PL/SQL
Because you don't know how to write Java in the database?
in Ingres I wrote SQL, in Oracle I write SQL

Because you don't know how to write Java in the database?
Daniel,
it seems that you have short term memory loss,

it also seems that you have never used Ingres.

Regards
Michael Newport

[michael newport]

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]

DA Morgan wrote:

You can, if you wish, get support for a license. That is annual, and
provides unlimited support calls. Quite different from licensing.

<heavy sigh>

When the facts don't support a position it is not uncommon to have
pseudofacts invented.

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]

Darin McBride wrote:

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.

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]

> 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?

which bit did you have trouble with ?

[michael newport]

Jean-David Beyer <jd*****@exit10 9.com> wrote in message news:<10******* ******@corp.sup ernews.com>...

michael newport wrote:

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.

It did, and the similarities were all too obvious.

>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.

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 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).

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.