Re: Comparison of DB2 and Oracle?

michael newport wrote:

>> 2. Support costs.
>>
>> This, with #1, is what you pay to the vendor, and often significantly
>> outweighs the purchase cost. Sure, Ingres may be free to "purchase",
>> but what about support costs if/when something goes wrong?
>>
>> At one time, support came free with purchase. Nowadays, it is swinging
>> heavily in the other direction, especially with commodity (read: open
>> source) software. The cost of 24/7 within-the-hour support is
>> significant, but so is its peace of mind.

> 
> I agree support costs money.
> But this is not product dependent.
> It depends on the support you need.
> 
> Mature products give you peace of mind, and Ingres has a long history.

Not quite - unchanging products give you peace of mind - as long as new features are added, things can break.

>> 3. Development costs.
>>
>> This is what the purchaser spends to integrate the software into their
>> infrastructure. This may be a lonely IT tech in a closet somewhere
>> figuring out how to get the software installed, or it may be an entire
>> software development engineering team with a few DBAs trying to
>> architect their business model inside the database. Generally
>> speaking, this outweighs both #1 and #2 together.
>>
>> If, then, the database product provides functions, stored procedures,
>> and other database-isms ("Oracle-isms" or "DB2-isms" for the newsgroups
>> getting this cross-posted) which save you 2 weeks of development time
>> in the pursuit of your business goals, right there you've saved a
>> significant portion of your purchase cost of any of the "expensive"
>> database vendors. I know that 2 weeks of my time is worth way more
>> than $400 - although I suspect most DB2 or Oracle deployments cost more
>> than $400 in purchase costs. Even with $20,000 in purchase costs, if
>> it saves me 4 weeks in development time, and a corresponding 1-2 weeks
>> in testing time (since I shouldn't need to debug that function - IBM or
>> Oracle have already done that for me), I've saved a significant portion
>> of that purchase cost... at least if I'm contracting. And we get to
>> market (deployment) 5-6 weeks earlier. If this new database
>> application is supposed to save the whole corporation 1 hour of work
>> per person per month, and there are 1000 employees, that's 1250-1500
>> hours saved in those extra 5-6 weeks, and it only takes an average of
>> $10/hour to pay for the rest of the purchase price of $20,000. In
>> other words, the "purchase price" is FREE at the point where the
>> application would be deployed if I didn't have those extra built-in
>> functions.
>>
>> And it's this last area that you seem to keep ignoring. I don't think
>> it's me who is having trouble with the thread...

> 
> Again, these costs are entirely dependent on people, not product.
> 
> More importantly OpenSource software is yours to change.

Ok, I see where you're coming from now. But I think you missed something. If I use a smaller product, such as Ingres, which doesn't have a function which takes me 4 weeks to implement, vs using Oracle or DB2 or MSSQL (big three) which does have that function, saving me, in effect, 4 weeks of development, then the "pricey" database just cost me nothing - the costs and the savings cancel each other out.

Small, stable vendor means reinventing the wheel on many projects. Received on Fri Oct 29 2004 - 15:22:16 CEST