"How do you get -23% on JDEC when it had a high of $49.75
Use the 52-week average share price (pretty much industry-standard).
"I don't know where you got the idea that I am a disbeliever in the AS400..."
Who cares whether you believe in the AS400? Again, AS400 (just like AIX, HP-UX, NT, MVS, etc.) is just another operating system. OS, DB and hardware are not something to get syncophantic about. What I have stated (and industry consultants have supported), is that AS400 has very good price/performance statistics and is extremely easy to support. It has also been my experience (and what I generally recommend) that if you are comfortable with Unix and want to keep a DBA, a system administrator, a system operator and an applications consultant on staff, go Oracle on HP-UX. If you want to sleep at night, go AS/400, buy Windows apps and upgrade your network on the $250k a year you'll save.
"...Lots of AS400 TPC benchmarks out there, aren't there...no. None. Never have been, never will be.
IBM uses TPC-C, the industry standard. This report comes from the Aberdeen Group and is somewhat dated but this reflects configurations most current midrange customers are using:
"
August 19, 1997 - IBM announced that it will begin delivering this month the next-generation of its well-respected System/3X-AS/400 product line with the high-end scalability that IS and business executives have been demanding for many years. The new high-end AS/400e series, effectively using the power of up to 12 64-bit PowerPC CPUs and the new OS/400 operating system, Version 4.1, has demonstrated the ability to deliver over 25,000 transactions per minute (tpm) using industry-standard benchmark tests. This is greater than the highest-rated single Unix server also scheduled for an August shipment, the Sun UltraEnterprise 6000, which requires 16 CPUs to generate slightly over 23,000 tpm. In addition, the same 12-way AS/400e series model has been tested at the high-end to support 2,400 users as the database server in a three-tier configuration on the SAP R/3 Sales and Distribution (SD) benchmark — comparable to the most powerful Unix server and almost double the capacity of the best-in-class NT server.
...IBM has engineered the AS/400e series to match or exceed the performance throughput capabilities of today's largest Unix and, in Aberdeen's opinion, MVS servers — and well beyond NT Server's very top end..."
"Sun sleeps with everyone...",
True. And this is why Solaris can't compete against IBM hardware and OS (MVS, VSE, OS/400, AIX).
"You can bet your butt they won't put it in Oracle8i where Oracle is putting theirs...
OneWorld runs on Oracle8.
"...the AS400 SQL I have seen IS pathetically simple because the AS400 is a poor SQL engine..."
Your beyond your technical expertise again. 90% of AS/400 database access has never been written in SQL. Very little SQL has ever been written specifically for AS/400 apps; its all RPG, COBOL or PL/1. If your experience has been with DBA-types futzing around on the AS/400, I suppose yes this could be true. AS/400 client server applications currently written (SAP, JDE, Peoplesoft) for the AS/400 use standard SQL (joins, commitment control, shared cursors, etc (all that gee-whiz, nifty database stuff ). Do you really believe that SAP and Peoplesoft would bother to port their apps to the AS/400 if they had to rewrite for AS/400 SQL? Again, Dialect of SQL does NOT matter.
...isn't that Centura stuff stable?
Ya got me here. Centura lost its technical edge about two years ago. Umang Gupta wouldn't let Oracle or CA buy it up. Too bad. Oracle got stuck with Developer2000 (a lousy tool by any measure) and Centura's about to be delisted.
"I fart in your general direction..."
Monty Python |
