Re: a comparison of different databases

rkwan_at_unixg.ubc.ca (Raymond Wan) wrote:

>Phil Edwards (news-uk_at_dircon.co.uk) wrote:
>: David Williams wrote:
>: > Phil Edwards wrote:
>: > >Technically Oracle is ahead of the field. What you need to consider is
>: > >whether this means a more stable product or simply one with lots of
>: > >additional features.
>: > What makes you say Oracle is ahead of the field??
>: Slightly longer answer: in my previous job I conducted an evaluation of
>: Oracle against Sybase, Informix and Ingres (not DB2); Oracle came out way
>: ahead. Also (for the DB2 crowd), there was a discussion about Oracle vs
>: DB2/400 on the AS/400 newsgroup recently. The consensus seemed to be "OK
>: so Oracle's ahead, _but_..." (you don't need all those features/it's not
>: as stable).
 

> Well, I'm new to databases, but I have a better yet much less
>scientific answer. I think Oracle is ahead or up there in the front
>because the oracle newsgroup seems to have the most traffic and in most
>bookstores around here, there seems to be more oracle books than any
>others. Maybe not an indication of being "ahead of the field", but at
>least, quite popular...
 

>Raymond Wan
>

Raymond, I largely agree with your observation. There is, however, the frequently overlooked issues of maintainability as well as ease of administration and development.

I have experience developing against Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase SQL Server, Informix and Oracle. I find PL/SQL and the Oracle tools old-fashioned, esoteric and stylistically incompatible with other leading databases. Also, the product I had most difficulty with during installation and development ... Oracle! Maybe the popularity of newsgroups should be interpreted as a result of product usage AND usage problems.

If I were responsible for the choice of a corporate database strategy, I would rather take the slower database with good administration/ development support (within reason) and throw more hardware at it. Furthermore, bad programming would make ANY database seem bad.

Thorough knowledge of a database system in conjunction with good development practice would make a good system out of any reasonable back-end.

Dion Received on Tue Jul 09 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST