Re: Company thought DB2 will be better than Oracle.

From: Daniel Morgan <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu>
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2003 22:37:23 -0700
Message-ID: <1063431428.466086_at_yasure>

Mark A wrote:

DB2 is good on Unix, Linux, and Windows also. DBA's don't like DB2
      

because
  

it takes fewer of them to operate and they think there are more Oracle
      

jobs
  

in the marketplace.

      

Couldn't possibly be the lack of security without Tivoli or other
similar products?
Couldn't possibly be the lack of training classes?
Couldn't possibly be the lack of books?
Couldn't possibly be the fact that you need a C compiler on a production
box?
Couldn't possibly be the lack of third-party tools and applications?
Couldn't possibly be ....

And this from someone with 10+ years of DB2.

In short ... there are plenty of reasons why someone might not like DB2.
Which does not mean I am one of them. But rather to try to pin it on
DBAs is a bit of a farse. Oracle, itself, is currently redesigning the
DBA's roles and responsibilities to be less RDBMS management and more
and more integration with application servers and other components. The
idea that Oracle is hard to manage is just a repetition of mythology: It
is no longer true. Just as many things about DB2 that were true five
years ago are no longer true.

-- 
Daniel Morgan
    

Those might be good reasons (if they were all true, but I don't agree that
they are) for a manager to make that decision in favor of one product over
another. But 90% of DBA's only care about the state of the job market and
how their skills match up to that market.

  

And why shouldn't they. The old social contract where employees were loyal to companies and companies were loyal to employees was stabbed in the back by MBA's quite a few years ago. Boeing, for example, has no shortage of people
whose jobs were off-shored just because it saved a few dollars.

And I'm not saying Boeing is bad and that I wouldn't have done the same in their position ... but under such conditions why shouldn't a DBA be thinking about the mortgage and putting the kids through college?

-- 
Daniel Morgan
http://www.outreach.washington.edu/ext/certificates/oad/oad_crs.asp
http://www.outreach.washington.edu/ext/certificates/aoa/aoa_crs.asp
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace 'x' with a 'u' to reply)

Received on Sat Sep 13 2003 - 07:37:23 CEST