Re: No future for DB2

"rkusenet" <rkusenet_at_hotmail.com> wrote in message news:3kkd26FurndhU1_at_individual.net...
> This article is very bleak about future of DB2. How credible is the
> author. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1839681,00.asp
>

There are several inaccuracies and illogical statements made in the article. For example he says that Oracle has won the Linux market because "Oracle that was willing to make the bold move by announcing at Oracle World its intention to convert its entire back office infrastructure to run Linux." AFAIK, all relevant IBM software runs on Linux, so I don't know what he is talking about. Oracle may being doing very well on Linux, but that is mostly at the expense of Oracle on other platforms.

His other basic premise is that the market is not big enough for 3 premium RDBMS vendors, and that DB2 will be odd man out. I don't see that happening anytime soon, if ever. The market is plenty big for all three, plus MySQL for some time to come.

Both IBM and Microsoft have one big advantage over Oracle in that RDBMS's only represent a small part of their overall revenue, and they can afford to cut prices, unlike Oracle who depends heavily on database revenues. So IBM will be able to undercut Oracle on pricing, and that will allow them to have a respectable market share.

Most people on this forum are more concerned about job prospects than which RDBMS is better or the actual number of database licenses for a particular vendor. The real key is supply vs. demand. If there are more Oracle DBA's than jobs for Oracle DBA's, then the job prospects may be dimmer than a less popular database with fewer available DBA's. Since their is plenty of room to make Oracle a lot easier to manage with fewer DBA's (DB2 and MS SQL Server are already easy to use) then the job prospects for Oracle DBA's may actually get worse even if the installed base gets larger. Received on Mon Jul 25 2005 - 13:47:40 CDT