Re: Is Ingress ...

In article <7734.2c5f717f_at_hayes.com> fgreene_at_hayes.com writes:
>In article <CB79C4.6r0_at_nvl.army.mil>, bajones@sparta (Ebeth Jones) writes:
>> Hi -
>>
>> I have a question that may or may not be appropriate for this group,
>> and hopefully will NOT start a major flame war.

Probably will.

>>I have been using
>> ORACLE for about 4 years now, as was the rest of our lab up until a
>> couple of years ago. At that time, the powers that be in our lab
>> decided to switch to Ingres, one reason being that you have more
>> visibility into files and more control over them.

Right, but visibility and security are two sides of the same coin.

>> I suspect that
>> another reason was that ya always gotta have something new, whether
>> its an improvement or not.
>>Anyway, we are now in the market to upgrade
>> or get a new database. My system administrator tells me that I should
>> go with Ingres, not only to standardize within our lab, but he says that
>> the reason Oracle is so popular is because its been around a long time
>> and everyone knows how to use it, not that its necessarily a good
>> database, and that he thinks Oracle is on the way out. Opinions?
>>
>> Elizabeth

Personally, (and I certainly do not speak for my employer here) I don't believe there is such a thing as "the best RDBMS". I'm certain that there are applications that run better under Ingres than Oracle. The opposite is certainly true as well. An informed customer will evaluate their options and select the RDBMS that fits their needs. As they do so, they will drive the market forward and force RDBMS providers to improve their products to stay competitive.

As far as "on the way out", however,
I'd recommend that your sysadmin look into current market share, which shows Oracle, Sybase and Informix as well ahead of Ingres. They aren't threatening to become number 3 in the market, much less clobbering number one - in fact, they're actually losing market share, where the other three are dividing an increasingly larger pie. Many Ingres customers lost confidence in them when they were purchased by ASK, and left them for one of the other three.

>Tell your system administrator that it would be best if he had his resume
>up to date. Has he not looked at V7, Forms4 or seen the Oracle/Novell
>announcements? What about databrowser et al? The people at Oracle may
>be at times an arrogant bunch of SOBs,

Again I don't speak for Oracle, but the Oracle that I see today is light years ahead of what existed three years ago in terms of customer responsiveness and product quality. There's still room for improvement and there's a top-down commitment to get there.

>but their product is good and keeps
>getting better.

Dave Criswell
Oracle Corporation
Just in case you missed the disclaimer that they put in, and the two that I put in, I don't speak for them. There. That's four. And in any case, they might have brainwashed me, so it might not even be my opinion. That's five. Received on Wed Aug 04 1993 - 22:50:37 CEST