Re: Oracle or Sybase?

In article <39r6ej$p1v_at_ucsbuxb.ucsb.edu>, Mark Schmidt <markts_at_mcl.ucsb.edu> wrote:
>
> easy question. the answer is progress.
>
> if your company insists it spend a fortune,
> then oracle is expensive enough and often works.

	I heartily agree!! I have never used Oracle or Sybase, but
	PROGRESS is much cheaper (for us), and from conversations with VARS
	and other database developers, is a much better choice, unless you
	need a specific app for one of the other databases. (I don't have
	the article this thread started with, so I don't know the requirements)

	I had no relational database experience when I started here, (15
	years of "hacking" and professionally using Basic, C, and some 68k
	assembly) but because of the simplicity and "logicalness"(!?) of 
	the 4GL language and how Progress does things, I could read any 
	of the existing 300,000 lines of Progress code and understand it and
	it's purpose within 1 week of starting. (And at the same time learn
	UNIX and system admin, and that took a _lot_ longer. ;)

	And if tech support is important to you, Progress is pretty good
	here too, and there is a very good mailing list that you can use
	to get very good and responsive answers to questions.

	But if marketing is important to you in selecting your database,
	Progress loses here. They tend to preach a lot, and give good
	User's Conferences worldwide every year, but that is mainly to the
	choir. 

	One of their strongest points is cross-platform compatability.
	The app we have here started as a small 50,000 line app on a 286 
	running single-user DOS version. It has gone through Xenix and is 
	now on SCO Unix, runing the whole company and supporting 35 users,
	and also gone through numerous version changes, (both OS and Progress),
	with the only changes made being for talking advantage of new features.
	Changing versions and OS's was done without the need for _any_ code 
	changes in all that time! (About 7 1/2 years - from the info I have)
	Just recompile with your new compiler and go.

-- 
David McCabe         PROGRESS Programmer/UNIX SysAdmin  Phone: (514) 676 6644
Rampart Partitions   St-Hubert   Quebec   Canada        Fax: (514) 676 1004