Re: Informix vs. Sybase vs. Oracle vs. (gasp) MS SQL Server

Michael Segel wrote:

> Gee, well, I guess you talked me in to this.
>
> Try writing a hotel reservation system for a major national hotel chain.
> Read: Hyatt or something like that. ;-)
>
> Try booking a reservation in a major city like New York.
> (Multiple properties, multiple nights and multiple rates.)
> Oh, and lets not forget the multiple DSRs (Dumb Shit Receptionists) who are
> trying to access this system..... ;-)

	I think your choice of example was poor. You may have a lot of
	user connections, but they won't be doing much. Reservations
	don't come in constantly (neither do you ever have a 100% room
	occupancy rate, but thats another unrelated issue).

	What you want is an example where hundreds of users are continually
	pounding a server.

> Lets also look at other applications where row level locking is important.
>
> Hmmm, OK, how about in the financial industry?
> In a mortgage generation application ?

	I don't see any requirement for RLL here. Can you be more
	specific.

> Or how about in a travel industry application like a flight reservation system?
> Or in the telecommunication industry?
> Or in a realtime inventory control / POS system?

        Same deal.

> True, you can write these with page level locks, however you won't get the performance,
> and you will have to write extra code to compensate.

	The extra code is trivial and isn't onerous to any reasonably
	competent programmer. Performance of RLL vs PLL has already
	been covered.

> Sorry Pablo, defend Sybase on another point. Surely there are things that Sybase does that
> Informix can't right? I mean, take Oracle for instance. They have some neat indexing
> techniques that Informix lacks.

	Every database server has its own perculiar list of "features".
	A lot of these are useless and are included for marketing
	purposes. In the end it boils down to the right tool for the
	job.

-am Received on Tue Dec 02 1997 - 00:00:00 CET