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

Which RDBMS/ORDBMS you choose depends on how much money you have in the budget and what your current system setup are they are going to dictate what software you will get and if you can find a "good" DBA to run it. I have worked with several of these databases and with different database admins and I have found out that your database is only as good as the design and the DBA. If booth a bad you will have a crappy database and it does not matter how fast or how good your RDBMS/ORDBMS is or can be. And primarily as an Oracle DBA I can say that most IT departments and DBA's don't understand databases and the new technology around the new designs of how databases are functioning and get stuck using only one method and fail to keep up on with technology. I can say I have admin over 40 databases at the same time with very little problem. And the last thing that most forget is that you want to have a "job" and if a company can remove the DBA out of the picture they will. That is what automation is about. I would strongly suggest that reading would be your best bet and that you choice sometimes not based upon knowledge but who your company partners are..example IBM promotes DB2.....

Andrew McLauchlan <mclaua_at_au1.ibm.com> wrote in message news:3931C358.6DD0C1E7_at_au1.ibm.com...
> 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 Fri Jun 02 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT