Re: Call for an API standard for SQL statements

"Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote:
> > > I don't think customers *actually* need DBMS independence
> > > nearly as much as they think they do.
> >
> > I strongly disagree again. The request for database vendor
> > independence have a strong motivation. Normally it takes many weeks of
> > expensive formal training to educate a database administraitor. If a
> > company decide to use lets say SQL Server, of course they just want to
> > buy software that runs with SQL Server. Using multiple database
> > vendors will make all their backup and maintainance work much more
> > difficult. The next customer might have choosen DB2, so a software
> > vendor have to make an application that works on all major databases.
>
> This paragraph had nothing to do with what I said. I was talking
> about intra-customer issues, and you're talking about vendors, or about
> inter-customer issues.

Yes I am talking about vendors, because we are discussing how vendords should build their applications to meet customer requests. If different customers requests support for different databases, the vendor need to make the application database vendor independent. Do you have another solution??

> In your estimation, how often to medium-to-large sized customers
> with significant investment in custom, in-house applications change
> the databases those applications work with, on average? At what
> rate do they actually migrate.
Because their applications mostly are not database vendor independent, they never do it. But if the applications there database vendor independent I think that most application would of course never be migrated, but some applications would be migrated one or two times during their lifecycle.

But you are talking about a specialized field of applications here. I don't know about your country, but the trend in Sweden is that most companies sell their software development units and prefer to buy the applications from software vendors that sell the same application to multiple customers.

Fredrik Bertilsson
http://butler.sourceforge.net Received on Mon Oct 25 2004 - 06:56:56 CEST