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

To: Thomas Mercer-Hursh who wrote (15760)	1/20/2000 11:58:00 AM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Thomas, I hope you get the part where John and I seem to have reached an agreement on the Oracle Gorillaness, based on a three market RDBMS model. Anxious to hear your opinion. BTW, I experienced on a weekly basis the objection to Oracle based on two pre-conceived notions: 1. Oracle is difficult to "program" and administer. "My little department just can't handle Oracle. We use SQL server 'cause it is so easy to take care of". 2. Oracle is very expensive. "We compared Oracle prices to MSFT SQL Server prices. They are way more expensive." Now I know that these objections are ill-informed, but the Regional/Departmental IT decision makers don't get a lot of attention from Oracle. They don't get a lot of attention from MSFT either, so all they know is what they read. The read Oracle's published price list and that's all it takes for them to choose MSFT (at this organizational level). That, imo, is why Oracle cut its published prices. They should have done it long ago. Now they need to tackle the "complex to support" image issue to fight this mid-market battle with MSFT.

To: Thomas Mercer-Hursh who wrote (15760)	1/20/2000 12:18:00 PM
From: James Sinclair	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

MSFT will certainly nibble away at the low end, but I haven't seen any sign of them even remotely being able to compete at the high end, certainly not anytime soon. Agree 100%. On the high end SQL Server has the added disadvantage of being available only on NT. I think most developers of enterprise class databases at least want the OPTION of hosting their databases on Unix. FWIW, I was talking with a pretty high powered consultant at a data warehousing conference last fall, and he told me his new favorite database was actually IBM's DB2. His claim was that IBM had added a lot of performance enhancements for large databases, and were pricing the product very aggressively. Given the success IBM is having marketing e-commerce front end software, I wouldn't be surprised if DB2 is showing up as the back end of a lot of those systems.

To: Thomas Mercer-Hursh who wrote (15760)	1/21/2000 3:08:00 AM
From: Dinesh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Hi Thomas Re: If anything, I would guess that ORCL was more vulnerable there to a technology shift, e.g., if OORDBMS started to become the thing to have Now, an OORDBMS would be an interesting thing to have. While we've been hearing so much about pure OO dbms', Oracle has been adding some pretty features such as Packages and Types. Some programmers even swear by them. I tend to view Databases as where the rubber meets the road. There is seldom any room for an "ideal" implementation. Not considering small installations. Microsoft SQL Server is pretty good thing at the low end. It does the job, it assumes so little of the user, and it's "integrated" with other apps. The UI is familiar. Oracle offers a good compromise between scalability, speed and robustness. It's not the fastest, not the purest, not the most innovative but it is very very practical. DB2 is only for those who can afford it. But it's truly awesome. Informix has certain strengths in terms of performance but their tools suck. In any event it is not likely to be a dominant player this decade. Sybase - I don't know if it still around. Just kidding. -Dinesh