Re: Database market share 2004

Paul <paulsnewsgroups_at_hotmail.com> writes:
> DA Morgan <damorgan_at_psoug.org> wrote:
>>There is another important reason too: Instrumentation. If they are
>>slow diagnosing why is a question of making guesses. That may be a
>>reasonable approach when supporting a small non-commercial web site.
>>It is a non-starter when talking terabytes and a requirement for 7x24.
>>And then there's that little problem with government requirements
>>around audits. They just aren't ready for prime-time.
>
> I have worked for a company (big player in its field) and had an
> interview with another (a giant in its field) where they had systems
> that ran on all of the major db's - SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and
> Sybase.
>
> These db's contain(ed) neither triggers, SPs, PL/SQL, Transact SQL
> or any other proprietary features of any of these db's. The only
> coding that varied between the db's was how to get an
> autoinc/generator/sequence value and that was in some sort of middle
> layer. They did make use of DRI in the db creation scripts.
>
> I'm not saying that that's a good thing (in fact I'm appalled), 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 think that it's
> only a matter of time before the IT industry is going to wake up to
> the reality that (at least as far as *_I_* have seen) very little of
> the capacity of an Oracle or DB2 is actually being used and make the
> switch to cheaper or Open Source db's.

You may want Oracle's instrumentation for terabyte-sized DBs requiring plenty-o-nines' uptime, but there are a whole lot of instances of "departmental" applications out there which are quite amenable to the 'leap' to free software databases.

For applications that are mostly used during office hours by the limited population of staff within a department, you don't get a lot of value out of the difference in licensing costs between Firebird or PostgreSQL and Oracle.

And there are plenty of those sorts of applications around.

-- 
(format nil "~S@~S" "cbbrowne" "acm.org")
http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/sap.html
Rules of the Evil Overlord #78.  "I will not tell my Legions of Terror
"And he must  be taken alive!" The command will be:  ``And try to take
him alive if it is reasonably practical.''"
<http://www.eviloverlord.com/>