Re: MS SQL Server vs Oracle vs DB2 (&Sybase too)

Someone else wrote:

> What's your take on administering DB2 vs. Oracle ?

My info on that is 3rd-hand... from what Meta Group told us (for their $100k worth of opinion), Oracle is 2x - 3x the admin. overhead of DB2 (& DB2 is no walk in the park!). Other hearsay is that takes 2x the # of DBA's to run an Oracle shop. I guess people have money to burn. And with Oracle, you better have plenty 'o money to burn anyway... <g>

>Is the training effort significant ?

Obviously there's DB2 training, very much worth it if you are using it. But the admin learning curve is a good 4 months for someone w/ MS SQL or Sybase experience.

But if you have ever done Xbase programming, I think DB2 makes the most sense. You have control over table spaces, buffer pools and external storage (DB2 managed RAM disks for Linux & NT w/ process address limits) that Sybase doesn't give you.

Not to dys Sybase. Just DB2 makes more sense from the ground up. I think the mainframe legacy has something to do w/ DB2 being a more structured & tunable environment than Sybase. Mainframers demand that kind of tweak & tune capability.

>Are there 3rd pty tools such as DBArtisan/Embarcadero for DB2

Yeh I think DBArtisan has finally caught up w/ DB2 v. 6 as well as MS SQL 7.

DBArtisan is a bit dangerous if you do 'migrations' from server to server. It'll SNAFU badly on Schema-BCP migrations. It's better to stage the schema extract w/out the FK / RI , bcp manually & then slap on the FK's last.

>How about backup and recovery and locking/contention.
>And does one scale better than the other ?

W/ Oracle, readers never block writers and writers never block readers. This is b/c of the row versioning engine ( visa vi Borland Interbase & Postgres ). So concurrency issues are gone forever, great for OLTP. The upshot is that for smaller stuff, Oracle won't be as fast as MS SQL or Sybase, but for truely huge stuff, Oracle will keep right on chugging w/out concurrency problems.

Last think I heard from one of MS's in-house consultant was that DB2 is still faster at queries than Oracle. Moreover, DB2 AS/400 has Encoded Vector Indexing - this is an awesome tech: low cardinality columns are now optimizable w/ *very* compact EVI indexes. These aren't "compressed" indexes like Oracle or Informix or Red Brick, this is a new technology. DB2 does in-RAM dynamic vector-hash bitmaps, so it doesn't need prep'd bitmaps that you have to maintain. It's all generally applicable, not an arcane maintenance problem. Hopefully DB2 UDB will see EVI's on NT & Un*x sooner than later.

/lee

+-----[ http://leebert.home.mindspring.com ] --------+ It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows. -- Epictetus (c.55-c.135) Received on Sat May 27 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT