Re: Informix vs. Sybase vs. Oracle vs. (gasp) MS SQL Server

Larry Stephenson <larrst_at_digital.net> wrote:

>
>Igor Chudov _at_ home wrote:
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I have been asked to do a comparison of captioned database engines,
>> to choose a database server for a medium size database (less than 2GB,
>> about 60-100 tables).
>>
>> I would appreciate both pointers to professionally done comparisons, as
>> well as your personal opinions on performance and reliabiilty of these
>> systems.
>>
>> There is a special emphasis made on reliability, so your accounts of
>> problems and crashes will be much appreciated. Oh yes, the hardware
>> will likely be Sun or IBM RS6000.
>>
>> Thank you.
>>
>> igor
>
I've worked with all three. IMHO, they each have their own points:

Sybase - great environment for administering or developing. The weakest point was its 'page-level locking'. That means that if you have a lot of users trying to get at the same tables, you'll often have users locked out. If they got this problem fixed, I'd recommend it the most.

Informix - great use of processing power on SMP computers. Fast loads and indexing, and the OLTP seems to function well. I really liked the stability and reliability as well. I recommend this database be used for your situation.

Oracle - lots of people use this. It has some strengths, such as row level locking, but the environment for developers and administrators are a little kludgy. It doesn't have some utilities found in Informix or Sybase, like a fast 'unload' utility for getting data out of tables. ( I hear there are some third party products that will do this). Overall very solid performance....just needs a few more bells and whistles.

By the way, I'd highly recommend that you go with Suns over the RS6000. I've had experience with these databases on the RS6000's, the Sun servers, and HP 9000's. You really need a box that's more scalable than the RS6000 if you think of increasing your DB size or the number of users. The multi-machine approach that IBM takes to scalability does not work as well as a big, single box that can take up to 12 processors. I think the databases are just not written in a way that take advantage of them.

Hope this helps Received on Tue Apr 15 1997 - 00:00:00 CEST