It looks like we have differing opinions on this subject, but you made some good points in your response.
"True, if you are talking about making incremental improvements in a well established marketplace. But
web and data warehousing are relatively immature markets where I think Informix can prove itself to
be a clearly superior platform".
===> If you want to look at the Data Warehouse DBMS market, you could argue thast Redbrick has proven itself to be far superior to either Oracle or Informix for systems that need to implement a Star Schema. But to a lot of larger conservative organizations Redbrick are "boutique" or not an IT standard, so they will not even be considered. It is these huge companies that are the market, and to them Oracle is probably a lot more established than even Informix are.
"In the Microsoft world, portability means nothing. If it isn't optimized for NT, it won't succeed. MS
SQL Server has performance and ease of administration. Currently, Oracle on NT is inferior in these
two areas. If you wanted scalability and 24X7 reliability, you wouldn't choose NT in the first place".
===> You may be correct, but it comes down to a battle of "standards". NT for departmental servers and Oracle as an RDBMS standard. Microsoft recognizes this and are essentially bundling SQL Server free of charge for large deals. I think Oracle are vunerable because of this aggressive policy.
"As a stockholder, what is the upside to Oracle"?
===> The 70% of corporate data that is still not held in relational format, a good core RDBMS product, some passable tools and applications and the marketshare position that it has.
(By the way I also own Informix stock, which has not performed as well as Oracle over the last 2 months). |
