Re: Database market share 2004

DA Morgan <damorgan_at_psoug.org> wrote:

>There is another important reason too: Instrumentation. If they are
>slow diagnosing why is a question of making guesses. That may be a
>reasonable approach when supporting a small non-commercial web site.
>It is a non-starter when talking terabytes and a requirement for 7x24.
>And then there's that little problem with government requirements
>around audits. They just aren't ready for prime-time.

I have worked for a company (big player in its field) and had an interview with another (a giant in its field) where they had systems that ran on all of the major db's - SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and Sybase.

These db's contain(ed) neither triggers, SPs, PL/SQL, Transact SQL or any other proprietary features of any of these db's. The only coding that varied between the db's was how to get an autoinc/generator/sequence value and that was in some sort of middle layer. They did make use of DRI in the db creation scripts.

I'm not saying that that's a good thing (in fact I'm appalled), but the fact of the matter is that many companies pay for expensive db's when in fact they are little more than bitbuckets. I think that it's only a matter of time before the IT industry is going to wake up to the reality that (at least as far as *_I_* have seen) very little of the capacity of an Oracle or DB2 is actually being used and make the switch to cheaper or Open Source db's.

Hence my .sig - I am trying to learn Oracle because that's where the jobs are, being DBA to underutilised db's... surfing here I come... 8-)

Paul...

-- 

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