Re: No future for DB2 - slightly off-topic, discusses what people are being taught at uni

"DA Morgan" <damorgan_at_psoug.org> wrote in message news:1122533361.487428_at_yasure...

> It is not that DB2 is technically incapable of competing. Rather IBM
> is presiding over an aging baby-boom workforce. Speaking only from my
> experience in the US ... a large number of colleges and universities,
> including mine, have active programs teaching SQL Server and Oracle.
> I can not think of a single one teaching DB2.

Speaking from my experience in the UK I find an even wider trend: in the four years by consultancy has been going we've recruited several graduate trainees. In 2001 and 2002 you could be pretty sure that most applicants from university would have a pretty decent grounding in UNIX and/or Linux, these being the platforms favoured by academia. We'd also find that most would have done at least one hands-on course or practical assignment with SQL Server or Oracle.

We didn't recruit in 2003 or 2004 and this year has been a real eye-opener. Perhaps less than one in five applicants has had *any* practical experience of a non-Windows OS - if they know about UNIX/Linux at all it's because they're done a theoeritical course lasting a most a couple of hours. Also, the level of database theory has dropped too: asked to name a commercial database system they name Access, which is the "database" that the majority of them have hands-on experience of. A few had also used SQL (as they call SQL Server, using the phrases interchangably). One or two were able to name a non-MS database product, which was Oracle. None had heard of DB2, Ingres, Informix etc.

When we probed into the characteristics of a database, and why it might be more effective for retrieving small sets of data from much larger sets, most struggled, and although one or two had a grasp of the principle of indexes (or "keys"), I'm can only remember one correctly identifying, even at a high level, how an index might help in this regard.

All this change in just 4 years or less. I've no reason to believe that the academic qualities of applicants is lower than in previous years: indeed we met some brilliant young people. But I infer from this exercise that UK academia at least has quickly gone from a bastion of UNIX to not teaching anything non-MS. Received on Sun Jul 31 2005 - 04:40:02 CDT