Re: No future for DB2

> I don't find DB2 to be any easier to learn than Oracle

There are corners of the product that can be a little more complex - perhaps locking sometimes, plans and static sql if you decide to use it. On the flip side there are areas that are much easier. The glaring one is backup & restore, that's a critical activity that's a piece of cake compared to oracle.

Over the last year two folks on my team received their db2 certification. Shockingly, they weren't in the 50s, these guys are in the mid-twenties. We worked together every thursday at lunch, went through the cert book, and both passed easily. These guys learned easily, on the job, with *zero* formal training. One of them is now the development and production dba for a very large data warehouse and set of marts. Knows the hardware, os, database configuration and tunings, optimizes the user's sql, designs new tables, create the etl as well as aggregation code, etc. Prior to twelve months ago he had never seen a database beyond submission of sql, now we're partnering on taking this real-time warehouse to high-availability. Oh yeah, and he also supported a critical oltp database as well.

In my opinion db2 is pretty easy to learn - it would have been far more difficult to get these guys to the same point in Oracle.

On the flip side, SQL Server, MySQL, and Postgresql would have been even easier than DB2 - but then again their scalability limitations (parallelism/partitioning/optimizer/etc) would have pushed so much extra complexity into the design it probably would have been tougher after all. Received on Thu Jul 28 2005 - 20:18:34 CDT