Re: feature & performance comparison

> I am posting this to both the Oracle and DB2 newsgroups in the hopes
> that I will get a better set of answers.

You are in for a flame war. Why don;t you do your own research? There are development licenses (free) for the full version of Oracle. IBM has to have the same thing in one way or another.

If you ask me which DB is better, you will get a good argument. If you ask a DB2 person the same question, you will get good arguments as well. That is because both Oracle and DB2 are _very_ good databases.

If you look at the marketing hype, you will get good, convincing numbers from IBM and you will get Oracle's small-print-filled guarantee of Oracle currently running 3 times faster than anything else or you get a million dollars.

I've had IBM people tell me Oracle runs better on IBM hardware (when we told them switching all our Oracle code and data to DB2 was not doable). They gave me impressive numbers (biased, as are _all_ benchmarks) and told me how much Sun hardware sucked (who did they think they were talking to, marketing?) compared to IBM's.

What I did when faced with the same choice as you (I was the one who introduced Oracle to our shop)? I went out and read a TON of papers put out by just about everybody. My decision did not come down to technical qualities, though -- both databases were capable of handling volumes incredibly greater than ours. The decision came down to which database company was headed where we wanted to go. The answer was crystal clear: IBM was just sitting there with no clear vision of what DB2 would be five and ten years from now; Oracle was becoming the Internet database (this was back in the end of the Oracle 7.3's lifetime). the choice was very clear back then, as my main goal was to revolutionize how our company did business, I needed to use a product undergoing a revolution too, not a database that was happy being mainframe-wise and not really sure where it was headed.

So do your own research. Research the company as well as the product, and rest assured with either product you will be on top of the game. Received on Thu Jun 07 2001 - 20:46:13 CDT