Re: Good News for MS Windows users: Your favorite database is here..

From: Mark Townsend <markbtownsend_at_home.com>
Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 23:04:27 GMT
Message-ID: <B72D92A5.B51E%markbtownsend@home.com>

in article 3B083C07.4CBEC414_at_us.ibm.com, Larry at lsedels_at_us.ibm.com wrote on 5/20/01 2:49 PM:

> The point is not so much that each edition exists everywhere as much as the
> fact that
> each edition offers compatible functionality. Can the same be said of Oracle?
> Is
> Oracle's Standard Edition functionally equivalent to the Enterprise Edition?
>
> Darin McBride wrote:
>

>> On Sun, 20 May 2001 19:13:21 GMT, Mark Townsend wrote:
>> 
>>> in article 3B07F89F.E9DEBEAA_at_us.ibm.com, Larry at lsedels_at_us.ibm.com wrote
>>> on 5/20/01 10:02 AM:
>>> 
>>>> Another dimension to this argument is the notion of functional capabilities
>>>> of
>>>> our
>>>> editions of
>>>> DB2 on UNIX, Windows and OS/2. Precisely the same functional capability is
>>>> offered in
>>>> the
>>>> four packages on these platforms: Personal Edition, Workgroup Edition,
>>>> Enterprise
>>>> Edition,
>>>> Enterprise-Extended Edition. This is not the case for the "competition".
>>> 
>>> Hmm - this is not exactly true at the current time - for instance, is the
>>> Spatial Extender available on all platforms ? Are all the extenders that are
>> 
>> Mark - the original claim seemed to be only for Unix, Windows, and OS/2.  And
>> it was only for the four UDB products themselves, not any add-ons.  The only
>> incorrect implication was that Personal Edition existed everywhere (it's only
>> on OS/2, Windows, and Linux).

Some of these are not actually add-ons - they are included in the list of functional capabilities whenever IBM describes the DB2 product.

Here's a quote from the IBm web page

> The DB2 Product family runs on non-IBM machines such as Sun and
> Hewlett-Packard as well as IBM hardware, and operating systems such as
> Windows, Linux, Sun's Solaris Operating Environment, HP-UX, NUMA-Q, AIX, OS/2,
> and handheld device operating systems such as Windows CE* and the Palm
> Computing* platform.

Unfortunately some of the member of the DB product Family simply aren't available on all IBM supported Unix platforms (AIX,Solaris, HP-UX and Dynix), all IBM supported Windows platforms (Win NT and W2000), and many aren't available on Linux at all. As an example,

The AVI extenders, which I believe are bundled with every edition of IBM UDB, don't seem to be available on Linux, Windows2000 or Dynix. The text extender has a similar fate. Other add-ins, which may be chargeable items, have even less support - for example IBM DB2 Spatial Extender runs on AIX, Windows 2000 and Windows NT only. Pity the poor customer that wants to text, image and location enable their web sites if they are on any of the other 'supported' IBM platforms. So the statement "Precisely the same functional capability is offered in the four packages on these platforms" is NOT correct.

>>> available on AIX and Windows 2000 also available on all other platforms
>>> (Solaris, HPUX, WinNT, Linux, OS/390, AS/400) ? How about Data Warehouse
>> 
>> OS/390 and AS/400 are not part of the original statement.
>> 
>>> Manager ? Query Patroller ? How do things look for the DB2 UDB 'family of
>>> products' on Dynix/PTX ? - One of those other acquisitions IBM promised to
>>> look after when they bought it

>

Standard Edition IS factored different from Enterprise Edition - that's why its cheaper. By and large, the APIs are the same for application portability, but Enterprise does include certain key unique features that are more applicable to very large systems with a large numbers of users, or large amount of data, or high end hardware systems. The rationale being that if you are just chipping around, you can use Standard Edition, but if you are mission critical, you should use Enterprise Edition.

What's the rationale behind IBM WE being exactly the same functionality as IBM EE, but less in price ? Intelligence test for customers ? Received on Sat Jul 21 2001 - 18:04:27 CDT