Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

> Not quite - unchanging products give you peace of mind - as long as new
> features are added, things can break.

Test plans are often overlooked, but this is people dependent.

>
> >> 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...
> >
> > Again, these costs are entirely dependent on people, not product.
> >
> > More importantly OpenSource software is yours to change.
>
> Ok, I see where you're coming from now. But I think you missed
> something. If I use a smaller product, such as Ingres, which doesn't
> have a function which takes me 4 weeks to implement, vs using Oracle or
> DB2 or MSSQL (big three) which does have that function, saving me, in
> effect, 4 weeks of development, then the "pricey" database just cost me
> nothing - the costs and the savings cancel each other out.
>
> Small, stable vendor means reinventing the wheel on many projects.

Are you thinking of a particular function ?

I was forced to use Oracle report server (paid for) but found it to be very buggy, so I had to 'reinvent' some functionality using utl file and Unix.

When you say big 3, do you mean by market share ? Received on Sat Oct 30 2004 - 16:28:30 CEST