Re: No future for DB2

 Data Goob wrote

> As far as Oracle, it really is Oracle-vs-Everyone-Else, on the merits
> that Oracle does not live by pessimistic locking--it is an optimistic
> locking engine, the only one worth mentioning. The important point
> here is that application development for Oracle is different than
> say for Everyone-Else on that alone. Having said that it means that
> if anyone really stands to be "odd-man-out" it would be Oracle, not
> DB2. It is far easier to get DB2 working in SQL-Server shops, and
> get people to actually using it.

This is a funny way of looking at. Obviously Oracle's none locking engine is perfectly suited to scaling multi user applications, particularly when most people are developing for stateless clients. The fact that developers have to go through the same gyrations for most other databses, copying data to private sessions to avoid locks, can hardly be a long term benefit for those databases. Yes developers hit problems moving to Oracle because of this but it is mostly because they want to do things that are no longer needed, see all the posts about creating temp tables in Oracle. You very rarely need to, just run the query, this is a database not a file system. The whole idea is you say what you want and let the database work out how to get it. This is alien to many developers, but is is also in part alien to databases that don't let you just run a query, or insert what you want to, without first working out how to go about it and not tread on other users of the system.

Obviously without these benefits competition is easier between locking databases, so it if it is easier to move between DB2 and SQL Server, as the technical merits are closer, it becomes more of a choice of OS or hardware and the database can become secondary. I don't see how this protects DB2 share as IBM does not have a good track record when it comes up against Microsoft in the software market. IBM's software business plays third fiddle behind hardware and services. It is a huge assumption that ease of migration will result in movement mostly from SQL Server to DB2.

Of course all this might change if reports of Microsoft's efforts to turn SQL Server into a none locking database are true. Although, again I don't see how DB2 being the only big, locking database along with Informix, Sybase and Ingres (maybe?) is going to help it much either.

-- 
MJB