Mark Townsend wrote:
> DA Morgan wrote:
>
>>
>> Seems to me that some of your fellow Informix folks here have been
>> reporting their licenses costing them multiples of the Oracle price.
>>
>
> This is what I could never get my head around with the way IBM went
> forward with Informix.
>
> For a billion dollars they got a database that had a great set of
> features (much more than DB2), measurable market share, an extremely
> loyal customer base eager for a white knight (no pun intended), a
> reasonably good partner base, and a dedicated sales force who could
> actually make real money from selling a great product with a good price
> point ......
>
>
> ..... and they walked away from it, prefering instead to use a
> non-dedicated sales force to push an inferior product by discounting
> and/or bundling heavily.
Nice spin doctoring. Informix was going down fast before IBM stepped in.
Also I strongly disagree with DB2 being inferior. Both products have
different strengths. DB2 for LUW is a multi-purpose DBMS, handling both
BI and OLTP reasonably well; IDS is a superb OLTP engine but without
OLAP, materialized views, scale out, powerful, orthogonal SQL, ... .
While Informix was investing into Illustra and a multi-threaded engine,
IBM executed on "Arrowhead" and implemented the most powerful SQL query
capabilities in the industry with the Starburst compiler.
Also DB2 had a fair set of GUI tooling and client integration which IDS
was missing when IBM purchased Informix.
Different trajectory. Can't say a car is inferior/superior to a
motorcycle. Doesn't work that way.
Cheers
Serge
--
Serge Rielau
DB2 SQL Compiler Development
IBM Toronto Lab
Received on Wed Nov 30 2005 - 12:39:15 CST
