Re: Oracle or DB2

"Scantland André" wrote:

> Thanks Daniel
>
> My concern is a lot more with the functionalities and maintenance
> requirements than it is about money. I'm in a municipal environnement and
> most of my colleages from other major cities complains about the need to
> have DBA's for day to day operations.
>
> We have to decide on either migrating to Oracle or DB2. After receiving
> great documentation and insights from those 2 compagnies, it seems that we
> are confronted to this reality.
>
> For applications designs, Oracle offers more functionalities but also
> requires more day to day maintenance!
>
> On the other hand, DB2 offers better performance and stabilities but
> personnaly I was impressed with web based Oracle 9i that offers 3 teers
> technology and online implementation of tables wich should reduce day to day
> maintenance!
>
> Thanks again for your reply
>
> André
> "Daniel Morgan" <dmorgan_at_exesolutions.com> a écrit dans le message de news:
> 3CF25260.AD2229AE_at_exesolutions.com...
> > "Scantland André" wrote:
> >
> > > As anyone migrated from DB2 to Oracle. If so here are my questions if
> you
> > > have any answers:
> > >
> > > 1- Why did you migrate
> > > 2- Was it a question of money or technology
> > > 3- What happend to your corporate applications running on DB2.
> > > 4- Any tips (do's and dont's) for choosing Oracle.
> > >
> > > We are planning to dump INGRESS and we have many proposition for DB2 and
> > > Oracle. Our major corporate applications are running under INGRESS so
> we
> > > are planning to rewrite them using Oracle or DB2.
> > >
> > > We have some applications running on Oracle but we find the licencing
> fee
> > > high and the maintenance difficult. Can anyone provide insights.
> > >
> > > Thanks
> > >
> > > andré
> >
> > Licensing fees are irrelevant compared with the cost of retraining or
> > replacing personnel. If you have in-house Oracle experience take advantage
> of
> > it. If not then which product you choose can be tied to cost but it should
> be
> > the full cost of ownership ... not just one piece of a very large puzzle.
> >
> > I find it amazing how managers, and some techies, get hung up on licensing
> > costs but think nothing of blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars in
> longer
> > development cycles, debugging, training budgets, testing, and deployment
> > because they don't really know the product.
> >
> > Cost of ownership is not just a software license. Think more broadly.
> >
> > Daniel Morgan
> >

For any serious database you need to spend the money and have the SysAdmins, DBAs, and senior developers.

I am at this second consulting for one of the largest cities in the country. In-house systems are based on several RDBMS products. But much of what I do is migrate them to Oracle. Why? Because most of the systems without competent support staff fail to perform.

With respect to peformance and stability I challenge you to find supporting documents (not produced by IBM) that supports the proposition that DB2 is superior to Oracle on identical hardware. I've worked with both don't think the difference between the two is significant enough to be of concern to anyone. At Boeing, for example, either one is acceptable for Line-Of-Business applications and I can assure you that their testing is far superior to that you will find in most places and vendor neutral.

Back to government ... one mistake I see over and over and over and over again with governments (and many businesses) is that they solve problems by throwing people at them: Low paid people. One good, and yes expensive Oracle DBA, can easily support 20 separate databases. One good UNIX SysAdmin the same. I'd rather have three or four senior developers at $100-$150K working with me than the seemingly unlimited resource of $40K-$65K people they seem to have in abundance.

[Quoted] [Quoted] No one would think of going into surgery with a dozen low paid (mediocre) surgeons rather than one highly paid specialist. You wouldn't go into court to [Quoted] face a murder charge with a dozen less-expensive recnet law school graduates [Quoted] trying to get their first experience when you could have one very expensive expert. When it comes to databases ... for reasons well beyond the bounds of [Quoted] rationality ... there seems to be some unwritten rule that says "We can afford [Quoted] ten beginning-intermediate developers but we can't afford to pay $200K to an [Quoted] expert." And that is clearly nonsense. The expert will get the job done.

Rant over!

Daniel Morgan Received on Mon May 27 2002 - 18:21:52 CEST