Re: informix market share

RollForward Wizard wrote:
> But what are customers
> really buying when they buy an Oracle database engine? Old technology.
> The engine never seems to change, just the wrapping and marketing.

Well....
The engine does change. Addition of new capabilities such as partitioning, objects, RAC, XML etc have all required deep surgery on a large code base.

And on the other hand - the old Informix war cry about "we changed the engine, Oracle hasn't, therefore we are better" always seemed to me to speak more of a lack of foresight(*) by the original Informix developers than anything else.

(*) Specifically the impact that read locking would have in large parallel environments. IDS managed to mitigate this somewhat with their redesign, but largely at the cost of horrendous checkpoint operations. I used to love to go head to head with the Informix 'superior' architecture conversation. At the time there was a single TPC-C result, with a single graph in it, that completely blew the whole argument out of the water. Used to take about 8 minutes to counter. Received on Tue Nov 29 2005 - 10:15:44 CST