Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

michael newport wrote:

> the true answer is to expand the question,
>
> Ingres does everything that DB2 / Oracle can, and Ingres is cheaper than
> both.

SNAP OUT OF IT MAN - seems you fell into a trance 10 years ago. Life has moved forward, and so have the RDBMS capabilities.

You seem to have come to a conclusion some time ago and are possibly now living a life of myths and workarounds. Programmers living in the age of mythology cost more to projects than products do!

>
> It is free.

Yes, the software is free. (But not GPL ... makes one wonder why!) The software is also somewhat hidden - http://www.ingres.com is marketing only. you need to go http://opensource.ca.com

>
> You get more bang for your buck with Ingres.
>

Sadly it's behind the times. The price is right for it's capabilties, but the cost of compensating for this older technology can be enormous. Even CA as much as admitted that they couldn't make money on it without a major overhaul when they made it FOSS. Coming from CA, that's heavy!

Commonly required capabilities like ROLLUP and GROUP BY GROUPING SETS, CUBE and common-table-expressions (aka WITH clause) make a huge difference - unless one prefers to spend money in development and maintenance.

FWIW, anyone wishing to compare SQL capabilities from a developer's point of view might want to look at the relevant SQL language docco for each (listed alphabetically):

DB2:
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/db2/udb/support/manualsv8.html

Ingres:
http://opensource.ca.com/projects/ingres/documents

Oracle 9iR2:
http://www.oracle.com/pls/db92/db92.docindex?remark=homepage

Now can we get back to the basic DB2 vs Oracle discussion?

/Hans Received on Sun Oct 24 2004 - 20:23:36 CEST