Re: Oracle vs DB2 vs MySQL - Which should I use?

From: Robert Claeson <robert.N-OSP-AM.claeson_at_NOS-PA-M.brightinteractive.com>
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 09:16:45 +0100
Message-ID: <96ql2f$1vn$1@news.itv.se>

"Matteo Gelosa" <m.gelosa_at_inet.it> wrote in message news:3A88EECA.93E24254_at_inet.it...

> I have to mention online backup and reorganization and the quality of
> the optimizer: you rarely need to optimize your query by hand. As
> defense
> to Oracle I have to say that what I reported is mainly from my collegues
> experience: I didn't used it too much, so I cannot speak directly. Once
> again I'm mainly a software development and believe me, DB2 CLI are
> many steps ahead with respect to Oracle OCI. They're standard, clear
> and simple to learn. I don't know the current Oracle situation, but two
> years
> ago the choice was DB2. To say nothing about the price...

It's still that way. Oracle is over 3x the cost of DB2 if you compare the
Enterprise versions. But if you compare the Workgroup versions, Oracle costs
a lot less than DB2. However, the Workgroup (I think it's called the

"Standard" version these days) lags behind in terms of versions.

One area where Oracle currently has a clear advantage over DB2 is in object support. Their jpublisher tools is also fabulous if you develop in Java. I have hopes for IBM to correct this in the next release, though. On the other hand, DB2 is a lot easier to install and manage than Oracle, and it has always been faster in the applications that we develop.

Oracle also has their own idea about what standards conformance is. DB2 follows the SQL standards much better than Oracle. Can't somebody tell those Oracle guys that an empty string ('') is NOT the same as NULL? I mean, if my application inserts a zero-length string into a VARCHAR, it's usually because the user WANTS it to be that way and KNOWS for sure that the value is a zero-length string (because he just erased the information in that field on the screen), not a NULL value that implies "unknown". Received on Mon Feb 19 2001 - 02:16:45 CST