Re: Anyone with experience with MMOG and databases?

On 12/08/05, Marquez, Chris <cmarquez_at_collegeboard.org> wrote:

> You may be right about Oracle being less "ISO SQL compliant", if that is
> the foundation of your "don't use Oracle" case.
> I don't know, but don't care really...and honestly it has never come up as
> a "real" issue and any of the places I have worked...granted a majority of
> those are mostly Oracle database...some SQL Server too.
>

A while back someone pointed me to this page:

http://developer.mimer.com/validator/comparison/upd_comparison_chart.tml

It compares Oracle 9i, DB2 7.2 and SQL-Server 2000 along with an RDBMS I'd never heard of before called Mimer SQL for complainace to ISO CORE:1999 SQL standard. It's based on an article at:

http://www.dbazine.com/db2/db2-disarticles/gulutzan3

Oracle supports 80%, ahead of both DB2 and SQL-Server.

My personal view, when we're buying apps where I work, is that I'd rather have an app that works really well with one RDBMS and not at all with the others than one that worked in a half arsed fashion with 4 or 5 RDBMSes and not at all with the others. Given the environment I work in (big organisation with lots of Oracle databases) it's best if that one is Oracle.

Standards have their uses, especially in things like safety, but in IT you sometimes have to compare the importance of complying with the standard vs creating something that works better. If you were talking about not complying with the standards (actually RFCs) for something like SMTP, NTP or DNS then it would have be something that worked a heck of a lot different because of the way those things are used. If partial non-compliance just means that you're restricting the RDBMSes an application will run on without porting then most organisations can apply a lower bar to the gains required.

I can't really accept the need for standards compliance so you can change RDBMS but not application as the company grows. If we take an HR system as an example, one that serves a 100 people on one or two sites comapany is probably not going to work for a company of 1000 people accross a dozen sites and definately not for a company with 55,000 employees accross 568 sites (i.e. my current employer). The odds are that as the comapny grows you're going to need to change many of the apps to fit, not just upscale the databases.

If the company shrinks dramatically then you're far more likely to rationalise the number of servers by consolidating onto a smaller number of servers and running multiple apps off one database server than to look to move to another RDBMS. Think about it rationally, what is more likely to save you money. Reducing the number of processors you run Oracle on (either multiple schemas per instance or multiple instances per box) or buying licenses for an inferior product then migrating your data accross?

Stephen

-- 
It's better to ask a silly question than to make a silly assumption.
--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l