Re: >Oracle's future

In a recent append, m0v5533_at_tamsun.tamu.edu (Mahesh Vallampati) writes...
>Doug Hewko (doug.hewko_at_synapse.org) wrote:
>: Is the role of ORACLE as a tool for database development expanding or
>: decreasing? I was informed by what I consider an authority on the
>: subject (a senior consultant in the data modelling division of the
>: Department of National Defence) that DB2 is the database program to
>: learn. So I am wondering if every ORACLE program will be converted to
>: DB2 or some other database program in the future? (I realize it won't
>: happen over night, but conversion techniques do exist.)
>
>In fact Oracle had 25
>employees in 1980. Today they have 11,000. The last i heard about IBM
>was firing 20,000 employees or so.
>In my opinion Oracle is the best software which is widely portable and
>is very efficent in terms of its tools for application development.

While it is true that Oracle is a fast growing company and that they hold a huge portion of the non-mainframe market (still, on the mainframe, DB2/MVS is pretty much the only game in town), it is also true that DB2 Client/Server is just starting out. It is new code, designed from the ground up to be a client/server database. DB2 Client/Server started shipping on OS/2 last summer. It started shipping on AIX late last fall. It will be shipping on HP/UX sometime this year. There are other ports in progress which are still confidential.

And while IBM has laid people off in the past year, not too many of them were in database development :)

IBM is trying to move into the workstation database market with competitive function, very high performance, and an absolutely bulletproof engine.

And remember what Mahesh said about IBM Research inventing SQL and relational databases? Well we have some of those same people helping to code DB2 Client/Server.

Pat Gainer Received on Thu Mar 10 1994 - 19:24:12 CET