No future for DB2

[rkusenet]

This article is very bleak about future of DB2. How credible is the
author. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1839681,00.asp

[Jurgen Haan]

Neil Truby wrote:

Speaking from my experience in the UK I find an even wider trend: in the
four years by consultancy has been going we've recruited several graduate
trainees. In 2001 and 2002 you could be pretty sure that most applicants
from university would have a pretty decent grounding in UNIX and/or Linux,
these being the platforms favoured by academia. We'd also find that most
would have done at least one hands-on course or practical assignment with
SQL Server or Oracle.

We didn't recruit in 2003 or 2004 and this year has been a real eye-opener.
Perhaps less than one in five applicants has had *any* practical experience
of a non-Windows OS - if they know about UNIX/Linux at all it's because
they're done a theoeritical course lasting a most a couple of hours. Also,
the level of database theory has dropped too: asked to name a commercial
database system they name Access, which is the "database" that the majority
of them have hands-on experience of. A few had also used SQL (as they call
SQL Server, using the phrases interchangably) . One or two were able to name
a non-MS database product, which was Oracle. None had heard of DB2, Ingres,
Informix etc.

When I was in school, which was a very long time (took me 7 years to
complete a 4 year education of Advanced Informatics (which has little to
do with witts, but more with the appealing student life ;)), I saw a
very disturbing flow. When I started we were educated in Oracle, Unix
(Solaris/Linux), Overall databases (isolation levels, ACID properties,
Locking mechanisms,etc) , Oracle/PL, Systems architecture,
ASM/C++/Haskell, etc. But when I finished it (a year ago): Assesments,
Projects, Learning to learn, communications, Windows, bla, communicating
with each other, bla, java, a bit of MySQL ('create table' and 'select',
enough to create a nice webpage able to show a shopping cart :'( ) etc.
The school is setting loose coorporate hippies, with a lot of knowledge
about working in project groups, but very little about technology. It
has become a school for Projectmanageme nt instead of IT specialists.
And this is not a single incident, it's happening all around here. (BTW,
this is what's happening in the Netherlands). It's really disturbing.

-R-

[Noons]

Madison Pruet apparently said,on my timestamp of 4/08/2005 9:21 AM:

Fair enough --- on the IDS informix server, to do this with say 5 instances
by issueing the two commands

cdr define template noons --database=noons --master=node1 --all
cdr realize template noons --syncdatasource= node1 node2 node3 node4 node5

This would set up an update anywhere of everything in the noons database
using the five servers.

Thank you. Like I suspected, you have to relicate the entire database.
It is much more efficient to do that in Oracle via dataguard. Like
I said nearly 24 hours ago. Of course, you can also template
the entire database and replicate the lot. Anything is possible,
provided you have sufficient resources.

--
Nuno Souto
in sunny Sydney, Australia
wi*******@yahoo .com.au.nospam

[Noons]

John Carlson apparently said,on my timestamp of 4/08/2005 12:25 PM:

Oracle DBAs or DB2 DBAs?? 8-)

None of them was an Oracle DBA. 5 were ex-DB2 dbas. Or so
they claimed. But they got sold to the client as if they
were all Oracle and all needed.
No one works like IBM/GSA to give Oracle the TCO spin... ;)

--
Cheers
Nuno Souto
in sunny Sydney, Australia
wi*******@yahoo .com.au.nospam

[Noons]

John Carlson apparently said,on my timestamp of 4/08/2005 12:41 PM:

I use ER under 9.4; it works quite well. Relatively low overhead . .
. . and I'm looking forward to 10.00.That's great. Someone please give the man the
blue plastic bucket.

And your point would be . . . . ?

None. Just like yours. Except I enjoy the theatricals.
A problem with that?

I'm saying, in my case with my
systems, it works. Not as perfect as I'd like, but it works.
In my case, a Toyota works. Not as nice as a beemer, but
it works.
Rows
get updated / inserted on source; rows get replicated to reporting
server. Nothing fancy . . . .
Same here. Not a cent extra spent over standard edition Oracle.
What can I say, I don't even run Informix...

No blue buckets needed . . . . I don't work for IBM. 8-)
OK then: give the man a grey bucket.
(that was the colour of the Informix PC SQL manuals, wasn't it?)
Correct the error / comment in direct proportion to the broadcast.
Your quote of . . . .
In "proportion "? The darn thread has been x-posted everywhere since
the FIRST post, NO ONE has BOTHERED trimming it and you butt-in NOW?
Kinda "johny-come-late" don't you think?
(no offence or reference to bedroom prowess meant)
comment gets cross-posted as well..
Really? I could NEVER have figured that out in a million
years! Thanks for the clarification.. .

If you don't really wish to talk
(intelligently or otherwise) about Informix, then why bother posting
to c.d.i?
Correction: I do not wish to talk in ANY fashion with cdi
people about anything. Please remain out.
You do have the right to post; other Oracle DBAs post here
too.
There is a masochist born every minute...
But when it gets ridiculous, we also have the right to either
correct or ignore.

I suggest you pick the last one. Which is what just about
everyone else has done. Because when you reply, you expose
yourself to further replies. And I know it applies to me
as well, no need to state the bleeding obvious. Nevertheless,
it is MY choice.

--
Nuno Souto
in sunny Sydney, Australia
wi*******@yahoo .com.au.nospam

[Noons]

Anton Versteeg apparently said,on my timestamp of 4/08/2005 6:15 PM:

Well, Montpellier <-> Nice is 275 km.
Both on the Cote d'Azur. Close enough for me.

This is Europe you're talking about Frank,
there are entire countries in there smaller
than that! :)

Smaller than 275 km ???
Ok , a couple are smaller than 275 square kilometers.

Back in 91 I drove out of Sweden one early morning. Ended up in
France in the afternoon of the same day. After zooming past
Denmark, Germany, Holland and Belgium. So I decided it was
probably worth going back and having a better look at the ones
I missed when I blinked. Spent the night in Holland. Nice
pub, near one of the freeways. Owner asked me where I had been
that day. When I explained he laughed and called me mad. Which
was probably quite true. Heck, I was in holidays! ;)

(of course over here we often drive 600Ks each way for the
weekend, but that's us geographically challenged people...)
<g,d&r>

--
Cheers
Nuno Souto
in sunny Sydney, Australia
wi*******@yahoo .com.au.nospam

[Serge Rielau]

Jurgen Haan wrote:

Serge Rielau wrote:

Call it RAC, GRID, autonomous computing, queuing, advanced XML,
information integration. I think the commercial database vendors will
stay ahead of the open source crowd for the foreseeable future.
Comparing marketshare between the faction in this environment is
another can of worms.

I DO think you're underestimating both growth rate and capabilities of
the OS databases. I honestly think those databases will gain a lot of
marketshare in a very short time.

<snip>
Let me qualify what I posted.
I think the commercial databse vendors will _technologicall y_ stay ahead
of the open source crowd.
Measuring Marketshare is a very difficuly thing when you add free stuff
to the mix.
What is the market share of ACCESS? What is the marketshare of all those
build-in niche products?
If we go back to the "# of books at Indigo" example ACCESS may well be
market leader.
For all I know the big three are already in the minority in number of
installations/amount of data stored/???. Who knows?

Let me spin it a different way:
What is the "marketshar e" of pedestrians in Toronto as part of the
public and private transportation? 0! Yet the sidewalks are choked.

The question for commercial vendors is: Does the market share as defined
in revenue shrink or grow. So far it has been growing. And that is what
is counting for teh commercial vendors.
As long as the pie for commercial vendors grows there is no threat.

Just my two cents not being an MBA or such...
Serge
--
Serge Rielau
DB2 SQL Compiler Development
IBM Toronto Lab

[Jurgen Haan]

Serge Rielau wrote:

The question for commercial vendors is: Does the market share as defined
in revenue shrink or grow. So far it has been growing. And that is what
is counting for teh commercial vendors.
As long as the pie for commercial vendors grows there is no threat.

By marketshare, is this the share divided over commercial products?
Because OS products cannot be calculated in this pie. no one can measure
the number of OS products in use, number of downloads is no good,
because the OS databases are mirrored and distributed among different
Linux/Unix flavors. To illustrate, no one on the face of this earth
(except the ones who work here) could know we use postgreSQL and Mysql
in our company, since the medium where it's installed from is a copied
slackware distro, and the databases are installed on several servers.
But for registered figures, we only use DB2, because we are a registered
customer with db2.
If you mean that the total amount of customers is growing, then you're
right, that's a good thing.
Considering tech aspect, most OS products tend to surpass their
commercial counterparts quite fast. Only take a look at desktops. I know
it's a dark unknown area and you need a good amount of knowledge and
time to customise a X desktop, but atm I have a desktop on my Laptop
which outperforms (and at least out-eycandies windows) both windows and
MacOS-X and which uses techniques which are to be introduced in the
upcoming Longhorn/Vista. But most people just don't know about it, or
think it's just a collection of toys or beta libs, there's no marketing
behind those products, but still they exist. Take a look at the progress
on the linux kernel, quite impressive. Other examples; Openoffice,
Mozilla, Apache, Samba (yes... samba 3 is technological superiour to the
SMB implem in both win 2003 & XP), where windows CE was a nice mobile
solution, more and more companies are using linux for embedded and
mobile solutions, DVD players, sattelite decoders, pda's, mobile phones,
navigational systems. But nobody knows... No one tells the public: we're
using OS software in our products.
Why do I take those Microsoft products as an example? Microsoft is a
major competitor in the general computer market, they have an enormous
amount of marketshare, but that does not mean their products are good.
Back ontopic: anyone noticed MonetDB? A new (registered @ sf.net in
2002) OS DB product built by the Dutch CWI institute. It uses some new
storage techniques and a transparent interface which enables the
database to use any type of language to access data. Both SQL and XQuery
are default supported. The database is lightspeed compared to both Mysql
and PostgresDB and already it has an UnixODBC interface, and new
features are added every day.

-R-

[Captain Pedantic]

"Jurgen Haan" <ju****@fake.do m> wrote in message
news:42******** *************** @news.xs4all.nl ...

When I was in school, which was a very long time (took me 7 years to
complete a 4 year education of Advanced Informatics (which has little to
do with witts, but more with the appealing student life ;)), I saw a very
disturbing flow. When I started we were educated in Oracle, Unix
(Solaris/Linux), Overall databases (isolation levels, ACID properties,

The type of acid properties *I* studied at university didn't have much to do
with databases!

[Serge Rielau]

I took the liberty to adjust the subject to the topic

Jurgen Haan wrote:

Serge Rielau wrote:

The question for commercial vendors is: Does the market share as
defined in revenue shrink or grow. So far it has been growing. And
that is what is counting for teh commercial vendors.
As long as the pie for commercial vendors grows there is no threat.

By marketshare, is this the share divided over commercial products?

Correct. That's how it's commonly counted. Because OS products cannot be calculated in this pie. no one can measure
the number of OS products in use, number of downloads is no good,
because the OS databases are mirrored and distributed among different
Linux/Unix flavors. To illustrate, no one on the face of this earth
(except the ones who work here) could know we use postgreSQL and Mysql
in our company, since the medium where it's installed from is a copied
slackware distro, and the databases are installed on several servers.
But for registered figures, we only use DB2, because we are a registered
customer with db2. Right. To gartner you are true blue and as long as your IBM rep doesn't
feel mySQL is eating into space that should better be owned by DB2 IBM
doesn't care. If you mean that the total amount of customers is growing, then you're
right, that's a good thing. Absolutely, and as long as the total amount of customesr grows for both
commercial and OS then that's good enough. Considering tech aspect, most OS products tend to surpass their
commercial counterparts quite fast.

<snip>
I think we largely agree. Not sure I agree on the technological surpassing.
I do not see Linux desktops (yet) outside of the geeky area and I don't
see how Linux has knocked teh commercial OS vendors over technologically .
Note however how Microsoft is struggling to incite customers to upgrade.
There is little to be gained technologically by going from one version
of Windows to the next for the vast majority of desktop users.
To most Windows 2000 was good enough. The moment Linux desktops
environment catch up with W2k and that is widely known I'd expect MS
#installations to tank unless they go free themselves because MS has no
where to go with the desktop.
If you look at DBMS again vendors are trying to avoid the trap by moving
upstream into "Informatio n Integration" and "Content management" (see
IBM's shopping spree) and Apps (Peoplesoft, Retek). Not moving upstream
to provide value means getting clobbered by the mySQL et al.

Cheers
Serge
--
Serge Rielau
DB2 SQL Compiler Development
IBM Toronto Lab

[Jurgen Haan]

Captain Pedantic wrote:

The type of acid properties *I* studied at university didn't have much to do
with databases!

*LOL* perhaps for the cmos battery in the DB server :)

-R-