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]

> Not quite - unchanging products give you peace of mind - as long as new

features are added, things can break.
Test plans are often overlooked, but this is people dependent.

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...

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

More importantly OpenSource software is yours to change.

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.

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]

DA Morgan <da******@x.was hington.edu> wrote in message news:<109892813 0.887686@yasure >...

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.

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 !!

[michael newport]

> $400 is less than we spend in a week for free softdrinks for our

employees. Get a life.

see a dentist !

[Billy Verreynne]

Why Oracle and not DB2? There are numerous sound technical reasons.

And this..

==
/home/billy/> sqlplus dataware@whs
SQL*Plus: Release 9.2.0.5.0 - Production on Mon Nov 15 15:27:06 2004
Copyright (c) 1982, 2002, Oracle Corporation. All rights reserved.
Enter password:

Connected to:
Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.4.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, Oracle Label Security, OLAP and Oracle Data
Mining options
JServer Release 9.2.0.4.0 - Production

SQL> set timing on
SQL> select count(*) from x25_calls;

COUNT(*)
----------
672839836

Elapsed: 00:00:35.18

SQL> exit
Disconnected from Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.4.0 -
64bit Production
With the Partitioning, Oracle Label Security, OLAP and Oracle Data
Mining options
JServer Release 9.2.0.4.0 - Production
==

Now anyone that have an idea what databases are about, will know what
a SELECT COUNT entails, I/O wise.. and how critical table and index
designs plays in optimising access and lowering I/O.

Can any other database, Open Source or commercial, come anywhere close
to this? I doubt it.

And no, this nothing to do with hardware. The above was run against an
old K-class HP-UX platform.

--
Billy

[Pete H]

what a dork...

Pete H
vs****@onwe.co. za (Billy Verreynne) wrote in message news:<1a******* *************** ****@posting.go ogle.com>...

Why Oracle and not DB2? There are numerous sound technical reasons.

And this..

==
/home/billy/> sqlplus dataware@whs
SQL*Plus: Release 9.2.0.5.0 - Production on Mon Nov 15 15:27:06 2004
Copyright (c) 1982, 2002, Oracle Corporation. All rights reserved.
Enter password:

Connected to:
Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.4.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, Oracle Label Security, OLAP and Oracle Data
Mining options
JServer Release 9.2.0.4.0 - Production

SQL> set timing on
SQL> select count(*) from x25_calls;

COUNT(*)
----------
672839836

Elapsed: 00:00:35.18

SQL> exit
Disconnected from Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.4.0 -
64bit Production
With the Partitioning, Oracle Label Security, OLAP and Oracle Data
Mining options
JServer Release 9.2.0.4.0 - Production
==

Now anyone that have an idea what databases are about, will know what
a SELECT COUNT entails, I/O wise.. and how critical table and index
designs plays in optimising access and lowering I/O.

Can any other database, Open Source or commercial, come anywhere close
to this? I doubt it.

And no, this nothing to do with hardware. The above was run against an
old K-class HP-UX platform.

[Billy Verreynne]

ph******@intell icare.com (Pete H) wrote:

what a dork...

And that is the best you can do Pete in response to a [SELECT COUNT]
on a VLT containing 672,839,836 rows that returns the answer in 35
seconds?

I've read Oracle being slammed for this and that and what not. So
instead of responding in kind, I simply show what Oracle is capable of
in the real world.

It is also not about counting rows in general. It is *what* it entails
(think I/O) and *how* it does it.

And the How It Is Done is what differentiate Oracle from others.
Inovative means of providing accurate and consistent answers - thus
enabling this very visible performance with a [SELECT COUNT]. And
this type of innovation and performance is across the board. Not just
with a [SELECT COUNT]. Though the latter tend to drive home the point
with an extra sharp and shiny edge.
--
Billy

[Lady Chatterly]

In article <63************ *************@p osting.google.c om> mi************@ yahoo.com (michael newport) wrote:

Serge,

would you like to see these other IBM products OpenSourced ?
I see what you mean.
Regards
Michael Newport

Why are you so sure?

--
Lady Chatterly

"I don't know who she is. I doubt that its a bot. I have my guess as
to who it is. Regard the frequency of posts. What frequent poster is
missing? That Be Packing, is an old mind trick. Ignore it." -- Pip

[Lady Chatterly]

In article <ed************ **************@ posting.google. com> in**@Boecker-OCP.com (Yukonkid) wrote:

"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,

Point made.
without going into much religious talking, ask yourself:
Give neither counsel nor salt till you are asked for it.
How many OS versions of DB2 are on the market?
How many OS versions of Oracle?
How?
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.
Are you positive about that?
Some of the things I like in Oracle
Do you wonder if you 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.)
Those found in their towards world understanding report.
yk
Oh ...
at least, all databases return the data that you store,

Why are you so positive?

--
Lady Chatterly

"Getting your ass kicked again I see. Lady C is quickly becomeing my
hero." -- Crawdad