Re: Microsoft destroys TPC-C records!

>Norris wrote :--
>
>
>
> You can read this article:
>
> Microsoft's top developer executives take the offense against
> competitor's claims
>
> http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/99/12/20/991220hnhotmsdev.xml
>
>

( more accurately, Norris tried pathetically to point me and others to an interview with some MS developers who are feeling a bit sorry for themselves because SQL Server has not made any significant 'waves' in the industry (why should it anyway - saving a bit of money by using a product which is less feature-rich than Oracle is hardly going to have companies phoning up the newspapers is it?) )

I've only one word to say to you Norris, - "Astroturf".

MS tried to create a fake 'grass roots' P.R. campaign a while back. It backfired. The term 'Astroturfing' was duly created.

When all a company can do is point people to its own P.R. on a topic, it generally means they've lost the P.R. war.

If their product was so great, they would point people to independant or third party reviews of their products. Going further, if the product was fantastic, they wouldn't need to point to ANY P.R. at all!

Face facts, SQL Server cannot scale in the Age of the Internet. MS rejected JAVA and now have no Enterprise quality offering for middleware software development. (DNA / COM / DCOM / VB / OLE / DDE - it's all the same rubbish, just repackaged and rebranded from time to time).

Marketing takes precendence over substance at MS --

just imagine the conversation -

<somewhere deep within MS...>

"hmmm - what is the very building block of all life as we know it???"

"DNA" "well guess what ... that's what we'll rebrand our code-sphagetti this year! That'll make it look and sound as important as the very building blocks of live itself!"

<another time...>

"hmmm The internet exists - what will we call our html / asp file server using HTTP for the internet?"  

"'Internet Information Server'!"

<look out viewers - there'll be another over-generalisation of a product name for marketing purposes along in a minute..>

"hmmm.. SQL is a standard for interacting with RDBMSes - what will we call our database?"

"I know -- 'SQL Server'"

don't you just love this overgeneralisation in their product names ?

• it reeks of pure arrogance if you ask me -
• it's as if their products are the only ones you'll ever need to 'serve information to the internet' or to 'use SQL to store and retrieve data'.

I could go on but to reiterate, with MS you get Marketing first and technology second (and a year late).

You can tell when their product is not up to scratch when they (or their astroturfers) can only point people back to articles generated / sanctioned / approved by MS themselves!

From recent discussions about their writer-blocks-reader nonsense and 'dynamic row level locking' i.e.
'row-level-locking-until-our-server-can't-handle-it-and-then-the-locks-are-escalted' it's clear that SQL Server, while technically able to store data / answer queries etc. is not much more than a pretty, wizard driven database.

So what if it's cheap - what company with anything important to store seriously ponders savind a few $0000 on the licence?

Last but not least - as I'm sure you all know - it is mandatory to install Internet Explorer 4.** before you can use SQL Server 7! That just about sums it up for me. Product bundling, anti-competitive and illegal business practises and inferior technology - Yay for Microsoft - long live Microsoft (NOT).

</RANT>

David P.

Oracle Certified DBA.