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To: Thomas Mercer-Hursh who wrote (15054)	1/13/2000 2:05:00 PM
From: Rickus123	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Thomas, Oops. Looks like we're leap-frogging each other with our posts. I think that Tracey (emmeling) correctly pointed out the switching costs actually are pretty high. For the bulk of users, one will do as well as another... I would say that speaks more to the 'barriers to entry' issue than to switching costs, but I do agree with your point about relational databases increasingly becoming commodity items. I'll check out the Progress stuff. --Rick

To: Thomas Mercer-Hursh who wrote (15054)	1/13/2000 2:21:00 PM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

THM, you have oversimplified ORCL's role and differentiators. Here are some: 1. Scalability (small to huge), running on virtually ANY Unix computer configuration, plus S390 (IBM). 2. Reliability. ORCL's RDBMS is pretty much bullet proof, compared to SQL Server, in particular. 3. Secure. ORCL's security is the most flexible on the market. Once an enterprise sets up an ORCL system, they really can't replace the security features. 4. Flexible deployment strategies, including large central server, distributed servers, and replicated database servers. 5. Web enablement. Apps written with Oracle's tools are automatically Web deployable using Oracle's 3-tier architecture for Web deployment, with full transaction rollback and full Oracle security--the same as client/server. 6. New 8(i) features and development tools for web deployment (WEBdb, for example.) ORCL's command of the RDBMS space is based on meeting the demands of its Fortune 500 customers for enterprise applications on the latest computing and communications platforms. All of this is far and above the SQL standard and creates huge switching costs. ORCL is the Gorilla of databases with MSFT SQL server as the Monkey.

To: Thomas Mercer-Hursh who wrote (15054)	1/13/2000 2:30:00 PM
From: emmeling	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

The switching costs are that high. RDBMS's differ in the way they store different types of data, range of values accepted, how long text fields may be, in what order different types of fields must appear, how referential integrity is specified and enforced, how stored procedures and triggers are written, etc. Once an application starts making assumptions about these things in its code, it's very hard to switch to another RDBMS. (Sort of like those 2-digit year assumptions that were embedded in all that COBOL code...) It may not be that important which RDBMS you choose when you start writing your application, but once you've committed -- you don't want to change your mind too often! --Tracey