Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

Mark Townsend wrote:

> Rhino wrote:
>

>> 
>> This is *not* a troll and we don't want to start a flame war! Scott just
>> want some honest facts to help him decide which product is best at which
>> jobs.
>> 

I agree Mark. This discussion, in a public forum such as these lists, will attract the strong supporters and will invariably devolve to a religious discussion.

First step should be to develop a set of business requirements. Then ask experts to explain how each product under consideration will satisfy the requirements.

Then decide based on who you trust! Ultimately both products, as well as some open source (or soon to be open source - sic), will satisfy many business requirements.

<Now my religious rant ...>

Don't let anyone tell you that Oracle is the most expensive - that myth comes from people who buy before they think (or have someone else think for them) and then avoid or are ignorant of what they have bought. And is encouraged by each and every competitor.

If used properly, and if you don't re-invent the wheel by using built-in features and capabilities, the difference in long term cost (between Oracle, DB2, Ingres, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, etc.) is very, very small.

I happen to prefer Oracle because it provides a lot of functionality in the database at no additional price - functionality that I see required in many apps such as: workflow, message queueing, replication, subqueries, direct http request/response capability, security, backup/recovery, admin & management tools, job scheduler (akin to cron, but inside the DB), DB initiated callouts to OS shared libraries, DB initiated mail & page, DB initiated TCP calls, and so on.

These capabilities may exist in other database managers, but if not (or if the developer doesn't know/understand how to use them in Oracle) these capabilities will be duplicated. That moves the money from "product price" to "development cost" in creating the application and the cost of supporting the application into the hands of the developer instead of the 'vendor'. (You pay for it somehow <g>)

Aside from that, there _are_ a few technical differences ... I'll leave those to others.

<end rant>

> 2) You have posted this message to a defunct Oracle group. If you insist
> on starting this at least use the right targets -
> comp.databases.oracle.server

Copied to comp.databases.oracle.server. Requesting all other threads and potential replies to this one PLEASE remove cdo and only use cdo.server

Thanks
/Hans Received on Mon Oct 18 2004 - 18:20:29 CEST