Re: Oracle versus Sqlserver

Joel Garry doodled thusly:

>directly to VT-52's. I vowed never to work on COBOL again, and to
>date have kept it with some minor exceptions (like links to old
>routines and bizarro layering of Oracle on old COBOL stuff).

Hehehe! Actually Pro*Cobol was quite popular here in Australia for a while. Fortunately most sites wised up!

>
>That's good to know! But horror stories are always so much more...
>interesting.

you mean like the first V6 alpha release I got (6.0.4 or thereabouts)? Created the database, created 1 table, loaded data, proved the row-locking was working. Scripted the lot, shutdown the instance. Try to start it again 1/2hour before the demo, no database anywhere. Gone, all data files blissfully blank.

Or the other time when we were installing the thick Ethernet backbone at Australian HQ (at 1 Pacific Hwy, for the locals). Put all the cables and drop-down boxes over the top of the roof partitions. Demo of SQL*Net next morning for the local press. Overnight the roofing guys came in, re-arranged the roofing partitions to put in the air-conditioning ducts, cut the thick backbone cable and re-arranged it through the new partitions. They were also kind enough to splice the cable back together with duct tape. Bless their helpfull souls...

And the V5 advance releases that had AUFI, then SQL*Plus, then AUFI, then SQL*Plus,etc etc. Didn't help at all when we had to demo the darn things to prospects here: they couldn't make their minds up. Neither could we.

Or the auditing in AF using LONG fields for the audit code? Which in V6 caused regular database corruptions. Of course, it was the DBA's fault...

>
>Hey, I jumped on him because he was blaming users for not properly
>designing and writing code when it was the vendors product limitations

Fabian was not (isn't?) a very politically correct person at the best of times! ;-) But I quite enjoyed his contributions. Still have a copy of his first book: for the time it was quite adventurous.

>Any of that old C$erve stuff archived anywhere? I pretty much stopped
>using it when usenet took off.

Dunno. I had a look at their archival site a while ago. To see if I could dig out some of the early discussions, as well as the stuff in Canopus. Couldn't find any. Some of the early OS2 fora are still in my OS2 disk, somewhere in my garage.
It's a pity if Compuserve has lost all the RDBMS discussions. There was a LOT of useful theoretical stuff there!

>arrogance was inexcusable" he said, IIRC). Nothing about _that_ in
>the O magazine history, big surprise. circa 1990. Hmmm, maybe on
>e-bay...

ROFL!
>To those who talk about how $500 in MS would be $500,000 today, I say
>for every Microsoft there were a dozen Kaypros and Ataris, and a
>thousand DEC/Xerox/Wang/Prime/DG/Polaroids...

Tell me about it. I did the maths last year: if I'd held to my initial shares of Oracle like I wanted instead of being forced to sell when I left, I'd have today the equivalent of about US12M$. That's in today's prices. I won't even tell you what that was when Oracle peaked above M$...

>Yes, I bought DEC as a
>"bargain" after it fell from $199 to $30 in the '80s, because it had
>the best engineered big-name rdb around. Just ask Larry. He snatched
>it up for a mere $100,000,000.

I could never understand which "genius" at DEC did the maths for that sale. Lessee: around 10000 RDB licenses worldwide. Each one paying around $10000/year in maintenance/lease fees. And DEC sells the lot for 100M$????? Heeeellllloooooooo???? No wonder Larry was so happy...

Cheers
Nuno Souto
nsouto_at_optushome.com.au.nospam Received on Wed Jan 23 2002 - 06:43:33 CST