Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: chirodoc who wrote (30338)	10/2/1999 1:15:00 PM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 74651

curtis - re: they are looking at msft and orcl now, but will check out sybase and informix if they fulfill their needs. I think the choice in today's world is MS SQL or Oracle, unless you already have a specific requirement for Sybase or informix which does not seem to be the case here. IBM's DB2 on either Unix or NT is a technically strong database but probably most appropriate for customers already using DB2 in a mainframe environment, since so far, not that many developers are doing DB2 ports and those "helper apps" turn out to be key to good productivity. re: remember that they will be transferring and storing a lot of medical IMAGES Both Oracle and MS SQL handle images easily and efficiently. re: are all of them equally good or do some platforms stand out. i have heard for mission critical unix is superior to NT. This depends a whole lot on what the overall environment looks like. For machinery dedicated to doing a database job, there is not a lot of difference in reliability between Unix and NT - it is mostly marketing hype. The fact that people tend to dedicate Unix servers to "just database" but tend to heap a bunch of other apps onto NT servers has contributed to this perception. But HP and CPQ will do guaranteed 99.9% available installations on either platform, with 99.99% available on some configurations. Headroom (ability to expand capacity within a platform configuration) can be greater on Unix servers, since one can buy large SMP machines in that space. But it is an expensive way to buy headroom, since those systems are 3 times (or more) the cost per transaction of the NT based systems. The customer needs to understand the tradeoffs to make an effective choice. There is no single right answer...