Re: Oracle comparison

"Generic Poster" <nospam_at_nospam.com> wrote in message news:3D0E5499.67AFFB6_at_nospam.com...
> Hello, at the risk of flamebait, I would like to ask you to comment on
> how or why you think Oracle compares favorably with other db products,
> both commercial and free. We do web development, and were recently
> contacted by a client who wants us to design a db for him on the web,
> which would be like a data warehouse for, say, up to 100 little
> webstores. We do not know a tremendous amount about the db field,
> though we can make them just fine. We recommended at first MySQL, then
> decided on PostgreSQL.

Your recommendations confirm what you wrote in the previous sentence. <g>

I'm not going to go into knocking one product or boosting another: I'm just intrigued as to why you made these recommendations, because that would determine a lot of the content of other responses you might get here.

Is it that they were free? Was cost the prime factor here?

Is it that you or your client won't be running Windows servers?

>The question also came up whether a commercial
> db would be the answer. We felt that at less than 4 TB, open source
> would do well but that more than that, commercial might be the way to
> go.

Even more intriguing. What possible reasoning process led you to conclude that there was a 4Tb watershed beyond which the likes of Oracle would be suitable for, but before which, these others would do sterling service?

I know you didn't mean to flamebait, but this is such a wacky line of reasoning that, prima facie, it looks like a joke.

For what it's worth, Oracle (and SQL Server and DB2) are perfectly competent products that would be entirely suitable for the suggested purpose, regardless of size. Cost might be an issue, and if the proposed database was going to be 1Gb or so, maybe they'd be overkill. But you should really consider things like concurrency, scalability, reliability, platform/OS independence, multi-versioning, read-consistency, performance and so on. The three products I mentioned address all these issues in their own way. Some address some of the issues better than others. I happen to think Oracle addresses them all superbly. But then, I'm biased. You mention none of these issues as factors "informing" your recommendation for the likes of MySQL, so it's impossible to know why you thought that and its ilk would be suitable -and there is therefore no basis for comparison.

Regards
HJR
>
> So, feel free to comment, knock the competition, point me to some
> webpages, whatever....
Received on Mon Jun 17 2002 - 18:42:11 CDT