Re: Database market share 2004

DA Morgan <damorgan_at_psoug.org> wrote:

>> but
>> the fact of the matter is that many companies pay for expensive db's
>> when in fact they are little more than bitbuckets.

>I have seen this too. But the solution is not to purchase an inadequate
>product. The solution is to replace inadequate IT management and, if
>necessary, inadequate IT staff.

What would your solution be in the case of a company that has to support 4 db backends, with issues like clients who say "We've damn well paid for X, so if your system doesn't do X, we'll purchase from somebody who does"?

4 times the programming, 4 times the testing, the potential for the introduction of bugs is increased almost exponentially.

>If you can use 3x5 cards don't buy a computer.
>If you can use a flat file don't use a commercial RDBMS
>But if data is a valuable asset it needs to be treated as one.

Oh, the data is valuable alright and in use by Blue Chip companies across the world, many of whom would be clients of a certain large aerospace manufacturing company situated in Washington State that you can't talk about - United Airlines is an example of such client.

It could well be that the UA dba's are tearing their hair out, but they're probably not the ones who made the purchasing decision about the s/ware, and rocking the boat mightn't do their careers any good.

I once worked for a company that had paid approx. 500.000 dollars (+ 50.000 a year support) for a programme that a colleague and I could have written in 6 - 9 months (well, the functionality we actually used, anyway). One of the tables had 35.000 (that's right thirty five thousand fields) - when I tried to get the system dumped (most of what it was supposed to be doing was in fact being done by people in Ops using Excel), I was chastised when I was overpersistent. When I turned in my resignation, the company folded 3 months later. The company that sold the rubbish programme is celebrating it's 22nd birthday.

Paul...

-- 

plinehan __at__ yahoo __dot__ __com__

XP Pro, SP 2, 

Oracle, 9.2.0.1.0 (Enterprise Ed.)
Interbase 6.0.2.0;

When asking database related questions, please give other posters 
some clues, like operating system, version of db being used and DDL.
The exact text and/or number of error messages is useful (!= "it didn't work!").
Thanks.
 
Furthermore, As a courtesy to those who spend 
time analysing and attempting to help, please 
do not top post.