Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

michael newport wrote:

>> Then again, perhaps it's not uncommon that when your opponent is
>> generally making no sense, that you stop reading his posts objectively,
>> and just assume that the whole argument is absurd, rather than just the
>> individual (and overwhelming) portions of it that really are absurd?
>
> which bit did you have trouble with ?

The lack of "T" in your "TCO".

I mean, there are many different costs in owning software. Not just the initial cost.

1. Purchase cost.

This is what you seem to be focusing on. Unfortunately, it's not the total cost. For most larger databases, it isn't even always a significant portion of the total cost.

2. Support costs.

This, with #1, is what you pay to the vendor, and often significantly outweighs the purchase cost. Sure, Ingres may be free to "purchase", but what about support costs if/when something goes wrong?

At one time, support came free with purchase. Nowadays, it is swinging heavily in the other direction, especially with commodity (read: open source) software. The cost of 24/7 within-the-hour support is significant, but so is its peace of mind.

3. Development costs.

This is what the purchaser spends to integrate the software into their infrastructure. This may be a lonely IT tech in a closet somewhere figuring out how to get the software installed, or it may be an entire software development engineering team with a few DBAs trying to architect their business model inside the database. Generally speaking, this outweighs both #1 and #2 together.

If, then, the database product provides functions, stored procedures, and other database-isms ("Oracle-isms" or "DB2-isms" for the newsgroups getting this cross-posted) which save you 2 weeks of development time in the pursuit of your business goals, right there you've saved a significant portion of your purchase cost of any of the "expensive" database vendors. I know that 2 weeks of my time is worth way more than $400 - although I suspect most DB2 or Oracle deployments cost more than $400 in purchase costs. Even with $20,000 in purchase costs, if it saves me 4 weeks in development time, and a corresponding 1-2 weeks in testing time (since I shouldn't need to debug that function - IBM or Oracle have already done that for me), I've saved a significant portion of that purchase cost... at least if I'm contracting. And we get to market (deployment) 5-6 weeks earlier. If this new database application is supposed to save the whole corporation 1 hour of work per person per month, and there are 1000 employees, that's 1250-1500 hours saved in those extra 5-6 weeks, and it only takes an average of $10/hour to pay for the rest of the purchase price of $20,000. In other words, the "purchase price" is FREE at the point where the application would be deployed if I didn't have those extra built-in functions.

And it's this last area that you seem to keep ignoring. I don't think it's me who is having trouble with the thread... Received on Thu Oct 28 2004 - 22:17:34 CEST