Re: Oracle or Sybase?
Date: 12 Nov 1994 10:47:44 -0600
Message-ID: <3a2rjg$1tp_at_mp.cs.niu.edu>
In article <markm.11.001E5E3F_at_mindspring.com>,
Mark Marcus <markm_at_mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>There are three main problems with progress:
>1) Market staying power - It will be very hard for a company as small as
>progress to compete with the Big Three and be a true long term player.
PROGRESS Software Corporation has been around some 12 years. It has always exhibited steady if not spectacular growth and has the annoying habit of only spending money it gets from current operations. It is in no danger of going under. It's users tend to be fanatically loyal, and it has a large number of applications written and available for sale.
>2) Database Size - Progress has a serious limitation on the size of a DB. A
>progress database can only be 200gig. With every company talking data
>warehouse, you can not even start to play with a DB under 200gig.
Strictly speaking, a PROGRESS application has a maximum table size for one (1) table of 256GB. It is trivial in a PROGRESS application to connect to multiple 'databases' and incorporate all of them into your applications.
In fact, you can trivially split your logical database into any number of physical database tables and not have to change a single line of your application.
This is one of the reasons PROGRESS scales well.
>3) Parallel Data Query - Informix and Oracle have today and Sybase has
>promised. The only way today to get top performance in a DB.
>
I don't know enough about this to comment.
>If you have a very small database, few users and little or no budget,
>progress is a great choice.
This is bull. Maybe PROGRESS can't serve every company, but it scales from bottom to top a lot better than most. There are PROGRESS applications with hundreds of users all over the world.
>Progress has great GUI tools that develop applications very fast.
>
>The gamble is if progress will be around in 5 years. I would not
>let my users take that chance.
Five years is a lifetime in this industry. There was an article in computerworld a few weeks back about long range planning and IS. You should read it.
I figure I'm serving my users by using a systems which
has great GUI tools that develop applications very fast -you
It is the ability to respond quickly to the changing business marketplace which distinguishes the superior IS department; not the ability to pick a database which lasts more than 5 years.
- greg higgins_at_happmis.com