Re: Should I buy Oracle??

"Azhar Chowdhury" <azhar_at_mail.citechco.net> writes:

>I am dedicated developer of Informix's tools. Recently local
>Oracle Consultant asked me to use Oracle 8 and leave
>Informix.

It seems to me that you've got two different questions here, even though you only asked one of them.

The first (and unstated) question is: Did you receive sound and/or unbiased advice from your Oracle Consultant?

I think it is very likely that this advice is biased, but that doesn't mean it wasn't sound. Just about anyone who has chosen Oracle or bills him/herself as an Oracle Consultant is likely to be biased in favor of that product over alternatives like Informix.

In some ways, this is an example of what my professor used to call Kulakofsky's Law: If the tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

Thus, Oracle experts are likely to see Oracle products as solutions to many types of problems, sometimes including those for which they might not be the optimal solution.

Your second (stated) question is the harder one to answer: Should you move from Informix to Oracle?

This depends on so many factors that it can't be answered by an outsider, even an Oracle Consultant.

Yes, there are many things we Oracle users like about Oracle, and more than a few things that drive us crazy! I suspect the same thing is true among Informix users.

Oracle works well for the applications I have applied it to, which is not to say that Informix couldn't also perform well in most or all of those applications. In my case, I spent close to a year evaluating the various RDBMS products (in 1993, back when Oracle was still on version 6), and finally chose Oracle. I have not regretted the decision, but it has not been a simple process to convert from our legacy system and COBOL.

Switching from a rival RDBMS introduces different levels of complexity, simplifying some of the educational process, such as how to design relational databases, and probably complicating it in other respects, such as mastering the nuances of Oracle that transform it from something that just works to something that truly performs well, especially in areas where Informix works differently than Oracle.

--
Mike Nolan