Re: IBM Mainframe DB2 vs Unix Oracle

Your mileage may vary.

I have worked on both.

I have more experience with DB2 than Oracle,overall even though I almost exclusively now work on UNIX, NT, Oracle.

I recommend the following resources.

www.db2mag.com
www.oramag.com
www.swexpert.com and pull the articles comparing the two.

The both can get you the same result but go about it slightly differently. As someone else said it depends on what you have in your shop already as far as skill sets go. You may have to get a new staff or train your COBOL, CICS, REXX, ISPF DB2 people in PL/SQL, C, korn shell,etc.

They both support most SQL constructs, stored procedures, triggers, java, LOB's and numerous other features.

When you perform your cost benefit analysis this is probably all management cares about. If you wish to compare platform costs go to www.xephon.com. I have worked in several situations where people were suprised that the mainframe was cheaper than UNIX after the switch was made. There are usually a ton of UNIX boxes sitting around vs. a few OS/390 servers.

Remember, your mileage may vary. Oracle can also run on the S/390. The newest release is supposed to really scale on OS/390. Oracle's new pricing scheme has made some people look the other way. Received on Sun Oct 29 2000 - 14:31:18 CST