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

I use DB2 V6 and V5 and Oracle V8 daily as a DBA and much prefer to use DB2 . Oracle is tedious and untidy. DB2 is neat and easily tuned. And this is is on 50Gb to 200Gb DBs (I've used Oracle longer) ..Andrew

leebert wrote:
>
> 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 Mon May 29 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT