Re: AS/400 and DB2 vs. Unix and Oracle

crobato_at_kuentos.guam.net (Christopher Robato) wrote:

>In message <4dc12i$q0h_at_vanbc.wimsey.com> - gschenk_at_wimsey.com (Gerry Schenk) wr
>ites:
>:>1. Are there more Business applications on the AS/400 than
>:>there is on Unix?
>
>25,000, possibly 30,000 applications versus about 10,000 for Sun or AIX.

I once read somewhere that the AS/400 applications range from coffins to zoo management. I suspect the writer omitted A and B because C for coffins sounds more spectacular.

>:>2. I can add practically anything to our Sparcs. In our shop, I have
>:>used a variety of drives. Drive selection is based on price, availability,
>:>speed and cache. I've added modems (Practical Peripherals, USR),
>:>printers (HP 3D, 4SIMX, dot matrix), terminals(Wyse 60s), drives
>:>(Seagate, Micropolis, Fast Wide - 20MBs), tape drives (DLT, 8MM, 4MM,
>:>QIC).
Will some AS/400 marketing bigshots take note of this.

>Unix can't be beat for free software. To ask for free software for the
>AS/400 is like begging for free parts from your Mercedes Benz or Cartier
>dealer. Good luck.

Oh yes, Unix is beaten by PCs for free software. There certainly are far less free software for the AS/400. I can think of only QUSRTOOLS (which is no longer free from V3R1 onwards unless you retrieve the old version and compile it yourself) and utilities from News/400.

Perhaps someone on this newsgroup can contribute an ftp site and the rest of us can contribute some of our software.

>:>4. Reliability. Our Sparc IPX with 64M RAM, 7G of disk, 2 SCSI
>:>controllers and has been in operation since 1991. In
>:>that time we've only had one serious problem and that was caused by the
>:>power supply on the external case that we put two drives into. Other
>:>than that it has been working reliably. It is running SunOS 4.1.3 and I
>:>am inclined not to upgrade it to SunOS 4.1.4 because it works. It has
>:>been a little work horse.
 

>I have heard of AS/400s that never went down since they went up in 1989.
>It's predecessor is even a tougher bitch---there are System 36s that hasn't
>gone down for more than a decade. The base of such machines are still
>significant, more than 200,000 of these System 36s, 38s and 34s, and the
>users just won't give them up.
>

I wonder if the reliability info on the Sparc include dbms-related software crashes. It is my impression that an ORACLE db requires far more dba effort than a DB2/400 db.

>That's more than enough. He does have to unlearn a lot of things about Unix,
>since the AS/400 can be a culture shock. You have to understand the system
>in terms of an object oriented paradigm, like everything in the system are
>encapsulated objects that you don't hack at. A lot of system implementations
>are hidden because of the paradigm, and security is extremely tight, with
>every object given a security tag.

I agree that going to the AS/400 can be a culture shock but it is not veryt big. I went through that transition and I only miss the ease of development on unix boxes. However, the extra reliability of the AS/400 is a reasonable trade-off. Received on Sat Jan 20 1996 - 00:00:00 CET