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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rickus123 who wrote (15056)	1/13/2000 2:31:00 PM
From: John Stichnoth	Respond to of 54805

Rickus and All--Are we misusing the term, "gorilla" in our discussions these days? We seem to have shifted from the idea of dominant, open, proprietary and moved to demanding patent-based as being the requirement for our gorillas. Oracle's DBMS is its own. Its file structures and command structures are unique to its product, in the same way that Cisco's OS is its own. Oracle dominates its market for large-scale DBMS. There is a substantial value chain in place, extremely high switching costs and barriers to entry. Existing customers have built large internal systems that aren't immediately portable to other platforms, Many providers of ancillary products have designed just for Oracle. No application written on Oracle's platform will work on any other platform. It would have to be completely rewritten. And that would entail retraining all of your database programmers in a new system. There is a whole infrastructure that has been established to support Oracle's existing customers. Oracle's installed base is big, self-important companies. Such entities take lots of handholding. Finally, we've seen Oracle's competitors follow the path of losing Gorilla-wannabees. Sybase is absolutely marginalized. IBM sells to its service clients (ie., it has retreated to a niche). Best, John

To: Rickus123 who wrote (15056)	1/13/2000 2:31:00 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Respond to of 54805

Oracle's addition of row-level locking was not part of standard SQL. My understanding is that SQL allows one to specify that one is locking the record, but that most vendors chose to implement this by locking the page containing the record since this is technically a bit easier. I.e., row or page level either has nothing to do with SQL or Oracle was one of the few who was doing what the SQL implied.

To: Rickus123 who wrote (15056)	1/13/2000 2:37:00 PM
From: emmeling	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

I agree with you about row-level locking. It was a major problem and Oracle solved it. THEN, once applications were programmed to use Oracle's method of row-level locking, it wasn't easy to switch to anyone else's implementation. Another thing I've been thinking about Oracle lately: the Gorilla Game states somewhere that the correct strategy for a would-be gorilla inside the tornado is to "ignore the user" and just concentrate on filling demand. I can honestly say that Oracle's development tools are horrible (especially in comparison with Microsoft's SQL Server). It was hard for me to imagine, when I started working with Oracle, how on earth they got to be the market-leader with tools like that. Now it makes sense to me -- they didn't have time to revamp their development tools. They were too busy shipping product. (In all fairness, Oracle's database engine is terrific.) --Tracey