Database market share 2004

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1820667,00.asp
The database market grew by 10.3 percent in 2004, fueled largely by hunger for business
intelligence and analytics, according to numbers released by the Gartner Group on Monday.
With 34.1 percent of the overall market, IBM holds a slim margin over its closest
competitor, Oracle Corp., which maintains 33.7 percent of the overall market. Microsoft
Corp. follows up with 20 percent of the market. NCR Teradata Corp. controls 2.9 percent,
Sybase Inc. claims 2.3 percent and others hold 6.6 percent. ADVERTISEMENT
The market growth figure doubles that of RDBMS (relational DBMS) market growth in 2003,
which was 5 percent, according to Gartner Inc.'s Colleen Graham, who authored the report.
"[The growth] came a lot from BI, data warehousing and data analysis," she said. "You can
tell that if you look at [NCR]; they had really strong growth, and they're a
data-warehousing database. That's where we're seeing a lot of this come from."
The market grew from just under $7.1 billion in 2003 to nearly $7.8 billion in terms of new
license sales. The continuing weakness of the U.S. dollar artificially inflated market
growth to some degree, Graham said, accounting for some 3 to 4 percent of overall growth.
"[Overall market growth] was probably somewhere between 6 and 7 percent," she said, after
considering that sales outside of the United States, when converted to U.S. dollars,
contributed more to vendor revenue because of currency conversion, as opposed to increased
demand.
Microsoft and Teradata led in terms of overall growth, with 18 percent and 17 percent,
respectively. However, there was no clear winner in market share overall. Because the
difference between RDBMS revenue for IBM and Oracle was less than $30 million, it is
statistically too close to declare a winner, according to the report, titled "No Clear
Winner in Overall RDBMS Market Share Race."
Read details here about Oracle's PIM Data Hub.
Winner or no winner, vendors were quick to point out the rosy parts of the picture.
Willie Hardie, Oracle's senior director of Database Product Marketing, found evidence that
the market is buying into the database company's grid vision and its pushing of RAC (Real
Application Clusters) clustering on commodity servers running on the Linux platform.
"Forget about databases specifically and look at server sales," said Hardie, in Redwood
Shores, Calif. "The growth market in servers is in small servers, with clustering of small
servers. That matches closely to Oracle's grid model: don't buy big servers; cluster
together boxes running Linux or Windows. No doubt there's a trend in the industry moving in
that direction, somewhat reflected in Oracle's growth in 2004."
The market for RDBMS on Linux, meanwhile, is red-hot. While still a relatively small part of
the overall RDBMS market, the Linux segment grew 118 percent in 2004, more than doubling
from $300 million in 2003 to more than $650 million in 2004.
Gartner found that Oracle has a growing lead over IBM in this subsection of the market, with
growth of 155 percent. Oracle now controls 80.5 percent of the Linux RDBMS market, up from
69 percent a year ago. IBM, meanwhile, slipped in 2004, coming to rest at 16.5 percent of
the market from year-ago figures of 28.4 percent of the market.
The Gartner report pointed out that Linux RDBMS revenue includes sales of Oracle 9i RAC,
which adds about a 50 percent premium on top of regular RDBMS license fees for that company.
Bob Picciano, vice president of database servers for IBM, said Oracle's growing Linux lead
is artificially puffed up by those add-on RAC fees. "What Oracle is doing is, they're
migrating their own Unix base to the Linux platform," said Picciano, in Somers, N.Y. "In the
process, they're increasing the cost of software to those clients, by introducing the cost
of RAC."
"Few users are acquiring Oracle for the Linux platform without the RAC option," the Gartner
report states. "Almost 20 percent to 30 percent of Oracle RAC deployments are estimated to
be on the Linux platform."
Hardie said the demand for Linux shows no signs of abating, coming from virtually all the
vertical industries and including implementations of data warehousing on clustered RAC-that
clearly not being a solution for the needs of a niche, he said.
IBM is set to fight back with DB2 features that compete with RAC. In particular, the
company's release of "Stinger," the next version of DB2, is optimized for Version 2.6 of the
Linux kernel, a move that's geared toward helping database clusters scale higher and perform
faster.
It is also intended to better exploit the speed of 64-bit databases and servers that rely on
multiple processors.
IBM's promise is that such multiprocessor servers can be joined in Linux clusters, as with
DB2 ICE (Integrated Cluster Environment), an integrated package that combines DB2 and
eServer Linux Cluster 1350 (xSeries, 325, BladeCenter) to provide a solution that, according
to IBM, can cluster from two to 1,000 servers and pick up nodes at the rate of four per
hour.
Picciano also pointed to Stinger's HADR (High Availability and Disaster Recovery) as being
the key to IBM's ability to deliver high availability at a fraction of the cost of Oracle
RAC.
"With RAC, the client needs to license all the processors on both boxes, and they need to
license the RAC feature," he said. "With HADR, you pay for processors on the primary [box]
and for one processor on the standby box. So the cost savings is much greater."
Picciano said that HADR has helped IBM do battle in sales situations where IBM and Microsoft
are in the room. "We're winning 89.4 percent of the time we're engaging against Oracle and
Microsoft" according to Q1 2005 numbers, he said, thanks not only to HADR but also to a
retrained sales team and the decision to price servers at the chip level rather than the
core level.
Microsoft, predictably, scoffed at the growth of the Linux database market. "Look at it:
It's a small market," said Tom Rizzo, director of product management for SQL Server. "You'd
expect some growth there, from such a small base."
Rizzo pointed to the healthy growth in the Windows database market as evidence that Windows
is "eating away at the Linux camp" rather than the other way around. The RDBMS market on the
Windows server platform grew 10 percent in 2004. Microsoft's market share grew 18 percent in
this segment.
Click here to read more about the increasing market share of open-source database
PostgreSQL.
That gave Microsoft 50.9 percent of the Windows RDBMS market, up from 47.4 percent in 2003.
IBM posted a 4 percent decline in this market segment, which followed a nearly 12 percent
decline in 2003-a slippage Gartner attributed to weak adoption of DB2 8.
Graham said she was surprised to see Microsoft do so well, given that the release of SQL
Server 2005, code-named Yukon, has been delayed so often and so long.
"We do our forecast and say 'OK, each of these vendors, which is coming out with a new
product? Where's each one been in the product lifecycle?'" she said. "To see Microsoft have
growth this strong, even before they release Yukon, that struck me as interesting. People
aren't waiting."
Much of Microsoft's success likely goes back to the overall interest in BI, Graham said-a
premise that Rizzo seconded. "BI is a tremendous growth driver for us, especially Reporting
Services, which we've seen a ton of customers buying and deploying," he said.
"That's why we invested so heavily in BI technologies across SQL Server. We put a down
payment many years ago, and now it's paying off in terms of revenue growth," Rizzo added,
pointing to the company's release of OLAP (online analytical processing) services in 1998,
which was the first of a string of BI technologies integrated into the database itself.
"People looked at us like we were kind of crazy," Rizzo said. "[They asked,] 'Why is
Microsoft integrating BI into the database? Most people buy it separately.' We're saying .
integrate it seamlessly into the database. All the people who thought we had four heads and
eight eyes, you look at the strategies of our competitors, they're starting to go down the
same path we started down years ago."rkusenet wrote:
> http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1820667,00.asp
> The database market grew by 10.3 percent in 2004, fueled largely by
> hunger for business intelligence and analytics, according to numbers
> released by the Gartner Group on Monday.
> With 34.1 percent of the overall market, IBM holds a slim margin over
> its closest competitor, Oracle Corp., which maintains 33.7 percent of
> the overall market. Microsoft Corp. follows up with 20 percent of the
> market. NCR Teradata Corp. controls 2.9 percent, Sybase Inc. claims 2.3
> percent and others hold 6.6 percent. ADVERTISEMENT
> The market growth figure doubles that of RDBMS (relational DBMS) market
> growth in 2003, which was 5 percent, according to Gartner Inc.'s Colleen
> Graham, who authored the report.
> "[The growth] came a lot from BI, data warehousing and data analysis,"
> she said. "You can tell that if you look at [NCR]; they had really
> strong growth, and they're a data-warehousing database. That's where
> we're seeing a lot of this come from."
> The market grew from just under $7.1 billion in 2003 to nearly $7.8
> billion in terms of new license sales. The continuing weakness of the
> U.S. dollar artificially inflated market growth to some degree, Graham
> said, accounting for some 3 to 4 percent of overall growth.
> "[Overall market growth] was probably somewhere between 6 and 7
> percent," she said, after considering that sales outside of the United
> States, when converted to U.S. dollars, contributed more to vendor
> revenue because of currency conversion, as opposed to increased demand.
> Microsoft and Teradata led in terms of overall growth, with 18 percent
> and 17 percent, respectively. However, there was no clear winner in
> market share overall. Because the difference between RDBMS revenue for
> IBM and Oracle was less than $30 million, it is statistically too close
> to declare a winner, according to the report, titled "No Clear Winner in
> Overall RDBMS Market Share Race."
> Read details here about Oracle's PIM Data Hub.
> Winner or no winner, vendors were quick to point out the rosy parts of
> the picture.
> Willie Hardie, Oracle's senior director of Database Product Marketing,
> found evidence that the market is buying into the database company's
> grid vision and its pushing of RAC (Real Application Clusters)
> clustering on commodity servers running on the Linux platform.
> "Forget about databases specifically and look at server sales," said
> Hardie, in Redwood Shores, Calif. "The growth market in servers is in
> small servers, with clustering of small servers. That matches closely to
> Oracle's grid model: don't buy big servers; cluster together boxes
> running Linux or Windows. No doubt there's a trend in the industry
> moving in that direction, somewhat reflected in Oracle's growth in 2004."
> The market for RDBMS on Linux, meanwhile, is red-hot. While still a
> relatively small part of the overall RDBMS market, the Linux segment
> grew 118 percent in 2004, more than doubling from $300 million in 2003
> to more than $650 million in 2004.
> Gartner found that Oracle has a growing lead over IBM in this subsection
> of the market, with growth of 155 percent. Oracle now controls 80.5
> percent of the Linux RDBMS market, up from 69 percent a year ago. IBM,
> meanwhile, slipped in 2004, coming to rest at 16.5 percent of the market
> from year-ago figures of 28.4 percent of the market.
> The Gartner report pointed out that Linux RDBMS revenue includes sales
> of Oracle 9i RAC, which adds about a 50 percent premium on top of
> regular RDBMS license fees for that company.
> Bob Picciano, vice president of database servers for IBM, said Oracle's
> growing Linux lead is artificially puffed up by those add-on RAC fees.
> "What Oracle is doing is, they're migrating their own Unix base to the
> Linux platform," said Picciano, in Somers, N.Y. "In the process, they're
> increasing the cost of software to those clients, by introducing the
> cost of RAC."
> "Few users are acquiring Oracle for the Linux platform without the RAC
> option," the Gartner report states. "Almost 20 percent to 30 percent of
> Oracle RAC deployments are estimated to be on the Linux platform."
> Hardie said the demand for Linux shows no signs of abating, coming from
> virtually all the vertical industries and including implementations of
> data warehousing on clustered RAC-that clearly not being a solution for
> the needs of a niche, he said.
> IBM is set to fight back with DB2 features that compete with RAC. In
> particular, the company's release of "Stinger," the next version of DB2,
> is optimized for Version 2.6 of the Linux kernel, a move that's geared
> toward helping database clusters scale higher and perform faster.
> It is also intended to better exploit the speed of 64-bit databases and
> servers that rely on multiple processors.
> IBM's promise is that such multiprocessor servers can be joined in Linux
> clusters, as with DB2 ICE (Integrated Cluster Environment), an
> integrated package that combines DB2 and eServer Linux Cluster 1350
> (xSeries, 325, BladeCenter) to provide a solution that, according to
> IBM, can cluster from two to 1,000 servers and pick up nodes at the rate
> of four per hour.
> Picciano also pointed to Stinger's HADR (High Availability and Disaster
> Recovery) as being the key to IBM's ability to deliver high availability
> at a fraction of the cost of Oracle RAC.
> "With RAC, the client needs to license all the processors on both boxes,
> and they need to license the RAC feature," he said. "With HADR, you pay
> for processors on the primary [box] and for one processor on the standby
> box. So the cost savings is much greater."
> Picciano said that HADR has helped IBM do battle in sales situations
> where IBM and Microsoft are in the room. "We're winning 89.4 percent of
> the time we're engaging against Oracle and Microsoft" according to Q1
> 2005 numbers, he said, thanks not only to HADR but also to a retrained
> sales team and the decision to price servers at the chip level rather
> than the core level.
> Microsoft, predictably, scoffed at the growth of the Linux database
> market. "Look at it: It's a small market," said Tom Rizzo, director of
> product management for SQL Server. "You'd expect some growth there, from
> such a small base."
> Rizzo pointed to the healthy growth in the Windows database market as
> evidence that Windows is "eating away at the Linux camp" rather than the
> other way around. The RDBMS market on the Windows server platform grew
> 10 percent in 2004. Microsoft's market share grew 18 percent in this
> segment.
> Click here to read more about the increasing market share of open-source
> database PostgreSQL.
> That gave Microsoft 50.9 percent of the Windows RDBMS market, up from
> 47.4 percent in 2003. IBM posted a 4 percent decline in this market
> segment, which followed a nearly 12 percent decline in 2003-a slippage
> Gartner attributed to weak adoption of DB2 8.
> Graham said she was surprised to see Microsoft do so well, given that
> the release of SQL Server 2005, code-named Yukon, has been delayed so
> often and so long.
> "We do our forecast and say 'OK, each of these vendors, which is coming
> out with a new product? Where's each one been in the product
> lifecycle?'" she said. "To see Microsoft have growth this strong, even
> before they release Yukon, that struck me as interesting. People aren't
> waiting."
> Much of Microsoft's success likely goes back to the overall interest in
> BI, Graham said-a premise that Rizzo seconded. "BI is a tremendous
> growth driver for us, especially Reporting Services, which we've seen a
> ton of customers buying and deploying," he said.
> "That's why we invested so heavily in BI technologies across SQL Server.
> We put a down payment many years ago, and now it's paying off in terms
> of revenue growth," Rizzo added, pointing to the company's release of
> OLAP (online analytical processing) services in 1998, which was the
> first of a string of BI technologies integrated into the database itself.
> "People looked at us like we were kind of crazy," Rizzo said. "[They
> asked,] 'Why is Microsoft integrating BI into the database? Most people
> buy it separately.' We're saying . integrate it seamlessly into the
> database. All the people who thought we had four heads and eight eyes,
> you look at the strategies of our competitors, they're starting to go
> down the same path we started down years ago."
My only criticism of this is that it is backward ... not forward
looking. Well that and the fact that it is from Gartner Group which
means it is irrelevant.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||Daniel,
What makes this year different from any other? It's always
backwards-looking, but that's the only way to capture actual data.
Larry Edelstein
DA Morgan wrote:
> rkusenet wrote:
>> http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1820667,00.asp
>> The database market grew by 10.3 percent in 2004, fueled largely by
>> hunger for business intelligence and analytics, according to numbers
>> released by the Gartner Group on Monday.
>> With 34.1 percent of the overall market, IBM holds a slim margin over
>> its closest competitor, Oracle Corp., which maintains 33.7 percent of
>> the overall market. Microsoft Corp. follows up with 20 percent of the
>> market. NCR Teradata Corp. controls 2.9 percent, Sybase Inc. claims
>> 2.3 percent and others hold 6.6 percent. ADVERTISEMENT
>> The market growth figure doubles that of RDBMS (relational DBMS)
>> market growth in 2003, which was 5 percent, according to Gartner
>> Inc.'s Colleen Graham, who authored the report.
>> "[The growth] came a lot from BI, data warehousing and data analysis,"
>> she said. "You can tell that if you look at [NCR]; they had really
>> strong growth, and they're a data-warehousing database. That's where
>> we're seeing a lot of this come from."
>> The market grew from just under $7.1 billion in 2003 to nearly $7.8
>> billion in terms of new license sales. The continuing weakness of the
>> U.S. dollar artificially inflated market growth to some degree, Graham
>> said, accounting for some 3 to 4 percent of overall growth.
>> "[Overall market growth] was probably somewhere between 6 and 7
>> percent," she said, after considering that sales outside of the United
>> States, when converted to U.S. dollars, contributed more to vendor
>> revenue because of currency conversion, as opposed to increased demand.
>> Microsoft and Teradata led in terms of overall growth, with 18 percent
>> and 17 percent, respectively. However, there was no clear winner in
>> market share overall. Because the difference between RDBMS revenue for
>> IBM and Oracle was less than $30 million, it is statistically too
>> close to declare a winner, according to the report, titled "No Clear
>> Winner in Overall RDBMS Market Share Race."
>> Read details here about Oracle's PIM Data Hub.
>> Winner or no winner, vendors were quick to point out the rosy parts of
>> the picture.
>> Willie Hardie, Oracle's senior director of Database Product Marketing,
>> found evidence that the market is buying into the database company's
>> grid vision and its pushing of RAC (Real Application Clusters)
>> clustering on commodity servers running on the Linux platform.
>> "Forget about databases specifically and look at server sales," said
>> Hardie, in Redwood Shores, Calif. "The growth market in servers is in
>> small servers, with clustering of small servers. That matches closely
>> to Oracle's grid model: don't buy big servers; cluster together boxes
>> running Linux or Windows. No doubt there's a trend in the industry
>> moving in that direction, somewhat reflected in Oracle's growth in 2004."
>> The market for RDBMS on Linux, meanwhile, is red-hot. While still a
>> relatively small part of the overall RDBMS market, the Linux segment
>> grew 118 percent in 2004, more than doubling from $300 million in 2003
>> to more than $650 million in 2004.
>> Gartner found that Oracle has a growing lead over IBM in this
>> subsection of the market, with growth of 155 percent. Oracle now
>> controls 80.5 percent of the Linux RDBMS market, up from 69 percent a
>> year ago. IBM, meanwhile, slipped in 2004, coming to rest at 16.5
>> percent of the market from year-ago figures of 28.4 percent of the
>> market.
>> The Gartner report pointed out that Linux RDBMS revenue includes sales
>> of Oracle 9i RAC, which adds about a 50 percent premium on top of
>> regular RDBMS license fees for that company.
>> Bob Picciano, vice president of database servers for IBM, said
>> Oracle's growing Linux lead is artificially puffed up by those add-on
>> RAC fees. "What Oracle is doing is, they're migrating their own Unix
>> base to the Linux platform," said Picciano, in Somers, N.Y. "In the
>> process, they're increasing the cost of software to those clients, by
>> introducing the cost of RAC."
>> "Few users are acquiring Oracle for the Linux platform without the RAC
>> option," the Gartner report states. "Almost 20 percent to 30 percent
>> of Oracle RAC deployments are estimated to be on the Linux platform."
>> Hardie said the demand for Linux shows no signs of abating, coming
>> from virtually all the vertical industries and including
>> implementations of data warehousing on clustered RAC-that clearly not
>> being a solution for the needs of a niche, he said.
>> IBM is set to fight back with DB2 features that compete with RAC. In
>> particular, the company's release of "Stinger," the next version of
>> DB2, is optimized for Version 2.6 of the Linux kernel, a move that's
>> geared toward helping database clusters scale higher and perform faster.
>> It is also intended to better exploit the speed of 64-bit databases
>> and servers that rely on multiple processors.
>> IBM's promise is that such multiprocessor servers can be joined in
>> Linux clusters, as with DB2 ICE (Integrated Cluster Environment), an
>> integrated package that combines DB2 and eServer Linux Cluster 1350
>> (xSeries, 325, BladeCenter) to provide a solution that, according to
>> IBM, can cluster from two to 1,000 servers and pick up nodes at the
>> rate of four per hour.
>> Picciano also pointed to Stinger's HADR (High Availability and
>> Disaster Recovery) as being the key to IBM's ability to deliver high
>> availability at a fraction of the cost of Oracle RAC.
>> "With RAC, the client needs to license all the processors on both
>> boxes, and they need to license the RAC feature," he said. "With HADR,
>> you pay for processors on the primary [box] and for one processor on
>> the standby box. So the cost savings is much greater."
>> Picciano said that HADR has helped IBM do battle in sales situations
>> where IBM and Microsoft are in the room. "We're winning 89.4 percent
>> of the time we're engaging against Oracle and Microsoft" according to
>> Q1 2005 numbers, he said, thanks not only to HADR but also to a
>> retrained sales team and the decision to price servers at the chip
>> level rather than the core level.
>> Microsoft, predictably, scoffed at the growth of the Linux database
>> market. "Look at it: It's a small market," said Tom Rizzo, director of
>> product management for SQL Server. "You'd expect some growth there,
>> from such a small base."
>> Rizzo pointed to the healthy growth in the Windows database market as
>> evidence that Windows is "eating away at the Linux camp" rather than
>> the other way around. The RDBMS market on the Windows server platform
>> grew 10 percent in 2004. Microsoft's market share grew 18 percent in
>> this segment.
>> Click here to read more about the increasing market share of
>> open-source database PostgreSQL.
>> That gave Microsoft 50.9 percent of the Windows RDBMS market, up from
>> 47.4 percent in 2003. IBM posted a 4 percent decline in this market
>> segment, which followed a nearly 12 percent decline in 2003-a slippage
>> Gartner attributed to weak adoption of DB2 8.
>> Graham said she was surprised to see Microsoft do so well, given that
>> the release of SQL Server 2005, code-named Yukon, has been delayed so
>> often and so long.
>> "We do our forecast and say 'OK, each of these vendors, which is
>> coming out with a new product? Where's each one been in the product
>> lifecycle?'" she said. "To see Microsoft have growth this strong, even
>> before they release Yukon, that struck me as interesting. People
>> aren't waiting."
>> Much of Microsoft's success likely goes back to the overall interest
>> in BI, Graham said-a premise that Rizzo seconded. "BI is a tremendous
>> growth driver for us, especially Reporting Services, which we've seen
>> a ton of customers buying and deploying," he said.
>> "That's why we invested so heavily in BI technologies across SQL
>> Server. We put a down payment many years ago, and now it's paying off
>> in terms of revenue growth," Rizzo added, pointing to the company's
>> release of OLAP (online analytical processing) services in 1998, which
>> was the first of a string of BI technologies integrated into the
>> database itself.
>> "People looked at us like we were kind of crazy," Rizzo said. "[They
>> asked,] 'Why is Microsoft integrating BI into the database? Most
>> people buy it separately.' We're saying . integrate it seamlessly into
>> the database. All the people who thought we had four heads and eight
>> eyes, you look at the strategies of our competitors, they're starting
>> to go down the same path we started down years ago."
>
> My only criticism of this is that it is backward ... not forward
> looking. Well that and the fact that it is from Gartner Group which
> means it is irrelevant.|||Larry wrote:
> Daniel,
> What makes this year different from any other? It's always
> backwards-looking, but that's the only way to capture actual data.
> Larry Edelstein
Gartner also makes predictions. Not accurate ones but predictions.
And if one looks at previous Gartner Group statements, 1, 2, 3 years
later, what were they worth? I mean except to Gartner Group's revenues?
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||"DA Morgan" <damorgan@.psoug.org> wrote in message
news:1117485555.324290@.yasure...
> Larry wrote:
>> Daniel,
>> What makes this year different from any other? It's always
>> backwards-looking, but that's the only way to capture actual data.
>> Larry Edelstein
> Gartner also makes predictions. Not accurate ones but predictions.
Don't know if it's the same in the US, but over here in Blighty the
supposedly independent analysts Gartner have attracted a lot of criticism
for advocating off-shoring in their editorials whilst at the same time
having an active consultancy arm that, er, helps companies off-shore!|||Neil Truby wrote:
> "DA Morgan" <damorgan@.psoug.org> wrote in message
> news:1117485555.324290@.yasure...
>>Larry wrote:
>>Daniel,
>>What makes this year different from any other? It's always
>>backwards-looking, but that's the only way to capture actual data.
>>Larry Edelstein
>>Gartner also makes predictions. Not accurate ones but predictions.
>
> Don't know if it's the same in the US, but over here in Blighty the
> supposedly independent analysts Gartner have attracted a lot of criticism
> for advocating off-shoring in their editorials whilst at the same time
> having an active consultancy arm that, er, helps companies off-shore!
In my opinion, and it is only "my" opinion ... Gartner Group has the
ethics of a great white shark in a feeding frenzy. Not sure about
"here in Blighty" but they are most certainly a blight: If not a boil.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||rkusenet wrote:
> respectively. However, there was no clear winner in market share overall. Because the
> difference between RDBMS revenue for IBM and Oracle was less than $30 million, it is
> statistically too close to declare a winner, according to the report, titled "No Clear
> Winner in Overall RDBMS Market Share Race."
Shewt! Brace yourselves, here comes another IBM aquisition!
If all else fails, BUY market share. Who will it be this time?
Teradata?
> "Few users are acquiring Oracle for the Linux platform without the RAC option," the Gartner
> report states.
They gotta be joking...
> to IBM, can cluster from two to 1,000 servers and pick up nodes at the rate of four per
> hour.
Attaboy! Let's hope they don't "pick their noses" as well...
> are in the room. "We're winning 89.4 percent of the time we're engaging against Oracle and
> Microsoft" according to Q1 2005 numbers, he said, thanks not only to HADR but also to a
> retrained sales team and the decision to price servers at the chip level rather than the
> core level.
No doubt helped as well by the false "Oracle vars" who end up
selling exclusively IBM solutions. Want examples?
> We're saying .
> integrate it seamlessly into the database. All the people who thought we had four heads and
> eight eyes, you look at the strategies of our competitors, they're starting to go down the
> same path we started down years ago."
Amazing. IE versus Netscape all over again. And people
STILL buy this crap...
Im summary, another typical Gartner report: wanna see who
is in front? Who pays more?|||Noons wrote:
>>"Few users are acquiring Oracle for the Linux platform without the RAC option," the Gartner
>>report states.
> They gotta be joking...
They aren't joking ... they ARE a joke.
If Oracle was selling that many RAC licenses IBM would be out of
business.
>>We're saying .
>>integrate it seamlessly into the database. All the people who thought we had four heads and
>>eight eyes, you look at the strategies of our competitors, they're starting to go down the
>>same path we started down years ago."
> Amazing. IE versus Netscape all over again. And people
> STILL buy this crap...
Worked once: And as P.T. Barnum said ...
> Im summary, another typical Gartner report: wanna see who
> is in front? Who pays more?
That's the way the work. Opinions for sale to the highest bidder.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||In message <1117509502.933106.137440@.o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>,
Noons <wizofoz2k@.yahoo.com.au> writes
>rkusenet wrote:
>> respectively. However, there was no clear winner in market share
>>overall. Because the
>> difference between RDBMS revenue for IBM and Oracle was less than $30
>>million, it is
>> statistically too close to declare a winner, according to the report,
>>titled "No Clear
>> Winner in Overall RDBMS Market Share Race."
>Shewt! Brace yourselves, here comes another IBM aquisition!
>If all else fails, BUY market share. Who will it be this time?
>Teradata?
>
>> "Few users are acquiring Oracle for the Linux platform without the
>>RAC option," the Gartner
>> report states.
>They gotta be joking...
>
You *can't* buy Oracle without the RAC option. Well you can, if you buy
Standard Edition One, but Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition both
include RAC. I don't know how much market share SEO[1] has, but you
could say that almost all Oracle licenses include RAC.
>
1: Probably negligible in the type of company Gartner is addressing.
--
Jim Smith
Because of their persistent net abuse, I ignore mail from
these domains (among others) .yahoo.com .hotmail.com .kr .cn .tw
For an explanation see <http://www.jimsmith.demon.co.uk/spam>|||Jim Smith wrote:
> You *can't* buy Oracle without the RAC option. Well you can, if you buy
> Standard Edition One, but Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition both
> include RAC. I don't know how much market share SEO[1] has, but you
> could say that almost all Oracle licenses include RAC.
Care to rephrase that? Ain't making much sense
right now... :)
If it was the case that one "couldn't buy Oracle without RAC",
then why point out that "few users are buying Oracle without
RAC for Linux"?
> 1: Probably negligible in the type of company Gartner is addressing.
Ah, but they put NO qualifiers in their "addressing",
do they? Therefore, others might conclude it's the
"state of the overall market". When it isn't, by any stretch
of the imagination.|||Noons wrote:
> Jim Smith wrote:
>>You *can't* buy Oracle without the RAC option. Well you can, if you buy
>>Standard Edition One, but Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition both
>>include RAC. I don't know how much market share SEO[1] has, but you
>>could say that almost all Oracle licenses include RAC.
>
> Care to rephrase that? Ain't making much sense
> right now... :)
> If it was the case that one "couldn't buy Oracle without RAC",
> then why point out that "few users are buying Oracle without
> RAC for Linux"?
>
Microsoft used to do this with Microsoft Office, I believe. They used to
package SQL Server with Microsoft Office (maybe they still do) and then
whenever an Office license was sold, it automatically resulted in a SQL
Server sales whether it was being used or not.
>>1: Probably negligible in the type of company Gartner is addressing.
>
> Ah, but they put NO qualifiers in their "addressing",
> do they? Therefore, others might conclude it's the
> "state of the overall market". When it isn't, by any stretch
> of the imagination.
>
Larry|||Jim Smith wrote:
>> "Few users are acquiring Oracle for the Linux platform without the
>> RAC option," the Gartner
>> report states.
>> They gotta be joking...
> You *can't* buy Oracle without the RAC option. Well you can, if you buy
> Standard Edition One, but Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition both
> include RAC.
Oh how I wish your statement was true: Alas it is not. SE includes a
very limited RAC license and only with 10g. EE has never and does not
now include RAC.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||"rkusenet" <usenet.rk@.gmail.com> wrote:
>Click here to read more about the increasing market share of open-source database
>PostgreSQL.
You would swear from this article that there were no other vendors of
db's other than Microsoft, IBM and Oracle.
Where was any mention of Sybase? Pervasive? IBM's Informix offerings?
Borland's Interbase? Someone must buy these products! What about MySQL
and/or Firebird? MySQL is not free for commercial use - what's its
market share? Pervasive have also started to support PostgreSQL, as
has another springup (other efforts to make money out of PostgreSQL
have failed), but companies can do it because of the FreeBSD licence.
No mention either of any revenue streams for companies that have
support contracts for any of the open source dbs.
From the MySQL site
--
The MySQL database server is the world's most popular open source
database. Over six million installations use MySQL to power
high-volume Web sites and other critical business systems ? including
industry-leaders like The Associated Press, Yahoo, NASA, Sabre
Holdings and Suzuki.
--
That has to be market share in some shape or form, but was completely
ignored in the article which only mentioned PostgreSQL, and even then
only provided a link, with no mention of its market share!
Paul...
plinehan __at__ yahoo __dot__ __com__
XP Pro, SP 2,
Oracle, 9.2.0.1.0 (Enterprise Ed.)
Interbase 6.0.2.0;
When asking database related questions, please give other posters
some clues, like operating system, version of db being used and DDL.
The exact text and/or number of error messages is useful (!= "it didn't work!").
Thanks.
Furthermore, As a courtesy to those who spend
time analyzing and attempting to help, please
do not top post.|||Paul wrote:
> "rkusenet" <usenet.rk@.gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Click here to read more about the increasing market share of open-source database
>>PostgreSQL.
>
> You would swear from this article that there were no other vendors of
> db's other than Microsoft, IBM and Oracle.
> Where was any mention of Sybase? Pervasive? IBM's Informix offerings?
> Borland's Interbase? Someone must buy these products! What about MySQL
> and/or Firebird? MySQL is not free for commercial use - what's its
> market share? Pervasive have also started to support PostgreSQL, as
> has another springup (other efforts to make money out of PostgreSQL
> have failed), but companies can do it because of the FreeBSD licence.
> No mention either of any revenue streams for companies that have
> support contracts for any of the open source dbs.
Apparently you haven't noticed how some of us from have been pointing
out the fact that a Gartner Report is worth nothing except to Garnter.
The company sells its opinions on the same basis that politicians sell
their votes: To the highest bidder.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||>> You would swear from this article that there were no other vendors of
db's other than Microsoft, IBM and Oracle.
Charts showing DBMS market share for 2003 and 2004:
http://www.SQLSummit.com/Trends/DBMSMarket.htm
Application server market share for 2003 and 2004:
http://www.SQLSummit.com/Trends/AppServerMarket.htm|||Paul wrote:
> Where was any mention of Sybase? Pervasive? IBM's Informix offerings?
Yes, in the actual Gartner report, not the eWeek diluted one. They
break out Informix revenues. Oracle beats IBM by a few points if you
don't count Informix.
> Borland's Interbase? Someone must buy these products! What about MySQL
> and/or Firebird? MySQL is not free for commercial use - what's its
> market share? Pervasive have also started to support PostgreSQL, as
MySQL *is* free for internal commercial use, it's just not supported.
Companies like Google make a mint by modifying GPL software and not
re-releasing the source because they don't ship a product, they offer a
service. IF they do release components, it's out of a spirit of
community giving ;)
To answer your question, Gartner does have an "others" category at
around 6.6% revenue or $517.1 million, which about the same share as
Sybase, Teradata, and Informix combined. This is down 5.2%
year-over-year, BTW. I assume this includes revenues from all the
smaller vendors, but I don't really know.
I'm not sure it matters that much: MySQL AB only had revenues of $5
million in 2002 -- at best they're $10-12 million now. (reference ..
http://uk.builder.com/architecture/db/0,39026552,20276852,00.htm).
To give you a reference point, RedHat had revenues of $124 million in
2004.
> No mention either of any revenue streams for companies that have
> support contracts for any of the open source dbs.
This measures "new license revenue" -- not support contracts. This is
a general problem with the enterprise software space, in that analysts
(and Wall Street) determine the health of a company purely based on its
"new licenses", not counting support or upgrades under maintenance.
I don't know how MySQL AB's accounting rules work, but it's hard to
fight against an entire industry's accounting practices. They may
suck, but they make sense given the value system of many enterprise
software buyers.
But also note that if they measured database maintenance, support &
services contracts, IBM and Oracle make billions off those too, so I'm
not sure that's the answer to give OSS databases more "cred".
> That has to be market share in some shape or form, but was completely
> ignored in the article which only mentioned PostgreSQL, and even then
> only provided a link, with no mention of its market share!
Again, it's a measure of new revenue market share. I'd say it's
pretty accurate on those terms, but can be misleading because these
press articles never quite paint the whole picture (Oracle leads in
UNIX, Linux, and is #2 on Windows -- yet IBM still is #1? Hmmmmmmm.)
Whether revenue is relevant, of course is debatable. But what's a
market without dollars? Does unit share really make that much sense
(especially in the embedded market)?
Look at it this way: most full time Linux or MySQL developers are
subsidised by venture or public capital today (MySQL has 17 million EUR
if I recall). They need license revenue to sustain that investment or
it's effectively going to be supported and developed by hobbiests,
college students, and engineers with an itch to scratch. That model
works well enough for creating a good product (like Linux up to 1.2
arguably). But it doesn't quite give one warm fuzzies about their
ability topple the big boys.
Anyway, back to making fun of Gartner. There's a nice disclaimer at
the bottom of the report: "The information contained herein has been
obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all
warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such
information. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or
inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations
thereof. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without
notice."
yay.
Cheers
Stu|||Stu Charlton wrote:
> Anyway, back to making fun of Gartner. There's a nice disclaimer at
> the bottom of the report: "The information contained herein has been
> obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all
> warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such
> information. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or
> inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations
> thereof. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without
> notice."
Which pretty much says it all ... a Gartner report is worthless except
to Gartner's revenue stream. I don't know why anyone pays any attention
to them.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||Stu Charlton wrote:
> Look at it this way: most full time Linux or MySQL developers are
> subsidised by venture or public capital today (MySQL has 17 million EUR
> if I recall). They need license revenue to sustain that investment or
> it's effectively going to be supported and developed by hobbiests,
> college students, and engineers with an itch to scratch.
The number of downloads is probably a better measure of the influence
of open source products. Trying to use capitalization or revenue as a
yardstick is problematical.
Much of the highly-visible open source software (MySQL, JBoss, Apache,
Eclipse, Linux) has had an infusion of venture capital or a commitment
of resources by large computer companies. For example, IBM committed to
spending more than $1 billion on Linux and donated servers and software
to the Apache and Eclipse foundations.
The economic effect of open source isn't limited to direct revenue from
licenses and support contracts. Companies that manufacture computers
know that open source contributes to the revenue stream from selling
hardware (e.g., 40 million web servers running Apache).|||ken_north@.compuserve.com wrote:
Wow I thought compuserve was dead or was it compuware or both?|||ken_north@.compuserve.com wrote:
> The number of downloads is probably a better measure of the influence
> of open source products. Trying to use capitalization or revenue as a
> yardstick is problematical.
Agreed, but arguably "number of downloads" is moreso. I remember back
during the dot-com boom, that was how ISVs measured their success.
Didn't get them very far...
> Much of the highly-visible open source software (MySQL, JBoss, Apache,
> Eclipse, Linux) has had an infusion of venture capital or a commitment
> of resources by large computer companies. For example, IBM committed to
> spending more than $1 billion on Linux and donated servers and software
> to the Apache and Eclipse foundations.
Absolutely (I mentioned the 17m EUR for mySQL). And it could very
well be that OSS is sustained through capital inflows without lots of
direct revenue to provide a return.
> The economic effect of open source isn't limited to direct revenue from
> licenses and support contracts. Companies that manufacture computers
> know that open source contributes to the revenue stream from selling
> hardware (e.g., 40 million web servers running Apache).
Great, but since the only major integrated hardware & software
companies are Sun & IBM, that's a rather limited set of companies.
Whither the ISV? What happens to Oracle, Symantec/Veritas, BEA, etc?
Do they need to get into the hardware business? I think not. And
besides, I don't think IBM really wants to lose DB2 share to mySQL.
So the question is whether OSS eventually sucks the direct revenue out
of the market. If there are enough vested interests to fund that sort
of effort, sure, it could happen. Apache is a great example of that
effect. I think the next area probably will be operating systems.
Databases will take longer, if ever.
Cheers
Stu|||Stu Charlton wrote:
> So the question is whether OSS eventually sucks the direct revenue out
> of the market. If there are enough vested interests to fund that sort
> of effort, sure, it could happen. Apache is a great example of that
> effect. I think the next area probably will be operating systems.
> Databases will take longer, if ever.
>
I think databases will happen sooner than you think.
Hardware is getting cheaper while getting faster,
storage is getting cheaper while getting faster
OSS Databases are getting faster and more stable while still being free.
The one point missing in OSS databases is support.
It's so damn hard to get any support on OSS databases.
That's why many companies still go for the mainstream databases,
for the false sense of safety (I pay for it so it must be good) and for
the support (which I still think is one of the most important issues).
-R-|||Jurgen Haan wrote:
> The one point missing in OSS databases is support.
> It's so damn hard to get any support on OSS databases.
> That's why many companies still go for the mainstream databases,
> for the false sense of safety (I pay for it so it must be good) and for
> the support (which I still think is one of the most important issues).
> -R-
There is another important reason too: Instrumentation. If they are
slow diagnosing why is a question of making guesses. That may be a
reasonable approach when supporting a small non-commercial web site.
It is a non-starter when talking terabytes and a requirement for 7x24.
And then there's that little problem with government requirements
around audits. They just aren't ready for prime-time.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||DA Morgan <damorgan@.psoug.org> wrote:
>There is another important reason too: Instrumentation. If they are
>slow diagnosing why is a question of making guesses. That may be a
>reasonable approach when supporting a small non-commercial web site.
>It is a non-starter when talking terabytes and a requirement for 7x24.
>And then there's that little problem with government requirements
>around audits. They just aren't ready for prime-time.
I have worked for a company (big player in its field) and had an
interview with another (a giant in its field) where they had systems
that ran on all of the major db's - SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and
Sybase.
These db's contain(ed) neither triggers, SPs, PL/SQL, Transact SQL or
any other proprietary features of any of these db's. The only coding
that varied between the db's was how to get an
autoinc/generator/sequence value and that was in some sort of middle
layer. They did make use of DRI in the db creation scripts.
I'm not saying that that's a good thing (in fact I'm appalled), but
the fact of the matter is that many companies pay for expensive db's
when in fact they are little more than bitbuckets. I think that it's
only a matter of time before the IT industry is going to wake up to
the reality that (at least as far as *_I_* have seen) very little of
the capacity of an Oracle or DB2 is actually being used and make the
switch to cheaper or Open Source db's.
Hence my .sig - I am trying to learn Oracle because that's where the
jobs are, being DBA to underutilised db's... surfing here I come...
8-)
Paul...
plinehan __at__ yahoo __dot__ __com__
XP Pro, SP 2,
Oracle, 9.2.0.1.0 (Enterprise Ed.)
Interbase 6.0.2.0;
When asking database related questions, please give other posters
some clues, like operating system, version of db being used and DDL.
The exact text and/or number of error messages is useful (!= "it didn't work!").
Thanks.
Furthermore, As a courtesy to those who spend
time analysing and attempting to help, please
do not top post.|||Paul wrote:
> DA Morgan <damorgan@.psoug.org> wrote:
>
>> There is another important reason too: Instrumentation. If they are
>> slow diagnosing why is a question of making guesses. That may be a
>> reasonable approach when supporting a small non-commercial web site.
>> It is a non-starter when talking terabytes and a requirement for
>> 7x24. And then there's that little problem with government
>> requirements around audits. They just aren't ready for prime-time.
>
> I have worked for a company (big player in its field) and had an
> interview with another (a giant in its field) where they had systems
> that ran on all of the major db's - SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and
> Sybase.
> These db's contain(ed) neither triggers, SPs, PL/SQL, Transact SQL or
> any other proprietary features of any of these db's. The only coding
> that varied between the db's was how to get an
> autoinc/generator/sequence value and that was in some sort of middle
> layer. They did make use of DRI in the db creation scripts.
>
> I'm not saying that that's a good thing (in fact I'm appalled), but
> the fact of the matter is that many companies pay for expensive db's
> when in fact they are little more than bitbuckets.
But presumably large bit buckets. I'm not very up to date on PostGres and
mysql features, but do OSS DB's support all these management operations
that can be done in parallel to production operation? In Oracle you can
create partitions on the fly without interrupting operations etc.
> I think that it's
> only a matter of time before the IT industry is going to wake up to
> the reality that (at least as far as *_I_* have seen) very little of
> the capacity of an Oracle or DB2 is actually being used and make the
> switch to cheaper or Open Source db's.
If they deliver the same robustness - it's not only about functionality
features.
Kind regards
robert|||Paul wrote:
> I'm not saying that that's a good thing (in fact I'm appalled),
We both are.
> but
> the fact of the matter is that many companies pay for expensive db's
> when in fact they are little more than bitbuckets.
> Paul...
I have seen this too. But the solution is not to purchase an inadequate
product. The solution is to replace inadequate IT management and, if
necessary, inadequate IT staff.
If you can use 3x5 cards don't buy a computer.
If you can use a flat file don't use a commercial RDBMS
But if data is a valuable asset it needs to be treated as one.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||"Jurgen Haan" <jurgen@.fake.dom> wrote in message
news:429f0643$0$17153$e4fe514c@.news.xs4all.nl...
> Stu Charlton wrote:
>> So the question is whether OSS eventually sucks the direct revenue out
>> of the market. If there are enough vested interests to fund that sort
>> of effort, sure, it could happen. Apache is a great example of that
>> effect. I think the next area probably will be operating systems.
>> Databases will take longer, if ever.
> I think databases will happen sooner than you think.
> Hardware is getting cheaper while getting faster,
> storage is getting cheaper while getting faster
> OSS Databases are getting faster and more stable while still being free.
> The one point missing in OSS databases is support.
> It's so damn hard to get any support on OSS databases.
> That's why many companies still go for the mainstream databases,
> for the false sense of safety (I pay for it so it must be good) and for
> the support (which I still think is one of the most important issues).
There is a very widespread perception that open-source operating systems -
RedHat for example - do not provide adequate support either. We have
encountered many risk-adverse users who would rather stick with Sun, HP or
IBM because of the absence of demarcation disputes between the OS and
hardware support vendors.|||"Neil Truby" <neil.truby@.ardenta.com> wrote:
>There is a very widespread perception that open-source operating systems -
>RedHat for example - do not provide adequate support either. We have
>encountered many risk-adverse users who would rather stick with Sun, HP or
>IBM because of the absence of demarcation disputes between the OS and
>hardware support vendors.
Given that computers are becoming more and more of a commodity, that
begs the question of why Red Hat doesn't supply PC's (for example) and
guarantee both the hardware and s/ware. I believe that one can
purchase Dell machines with Red Hat preinstalled - I would imagine
that getting support for this config would not be difficult?
Paul...
plinehan __at__ yahoo __dot__ __com__
XP Pro, SP 2,
Oracle, 9.2.0.1.0 (Enterprise Ed.)
Interbase 6.0.2.0;
When asking database related questions, please give other posters
some clues, like operating system, version of db being used and DDL.
The exact text and/or number of error messages is useful (!= "it didn't work!").
Thanks.
Furthermore, As a courtesy to those who spend
time analysing and attempting to help, please
do not top post.|||"Robert Klemme" <bob.news@.gmx.net> wrote:
>> I'm not saying that that's a good thing (in fact I'm appalled), but
>> the fact of the matter is that many companies pay for expensive db's
>> when in fact they are little more than bitbuckets.
>But presumably large bit buckets.
Indeed.
> I'm not very up to date on PostGres
http://www.postgresql.org/about/advantages
> and mysql features,
MySQL features can be got from their site. They only recently
introducted DRI, triggers, SP's and a whole raft of other stuff which
take it out of the "toy" db, good only for serving 100 web pages a
day. I'd wait a while to see if the truckload of new features that
they've introduced work properly.
> but do OSS DB's support all these management operations
>that can be done in parallel to production operation? In Oracle you can
>create partitions on the fly without interrupting operations etc.
OSS db's trail behind the likes of Oracle obviously, but how many
people actually require hot repartitioning? I don't think PGSQL
supports this (they introduced tablespaces in version 8), so maybe
they trail in terms of functionality.
They are ambitious and have lots of plans
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs.TODO.html
I have on occasion gone into work on a Saturday/Sunday to perform
large scale operations on db's other than Oracle which couldn't be
done hot. I got double pay and a day in lieu - I agree that it's
better if the db can do it on the fly, but it's an issue which can be
worked around. What did Oracle practitioners do before this became
possible?
>> I think that it's
>> only a matter of time before the IT industry is going to wake up to
>> the reality that (at least as far as *_I_* have seen) very little of
>> the capacity of an Oracle or DB2 is actually being used and make the
>> switch to cheaper or Open Source db's.
>If they deliver the same robustness - it's not only about functionality
>features.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39020384,39173013,00.htm
suggests robustness to me. Firebird is also very solid, having 20
years of commercial development behind it.
Paul...
> robert
plinehan __at__ yahoo __dot__ __com__
XP Pro, SP 2,
Oracle, 9.2.0.1.0 (Enterprise Ed.)
Interbase 6.0.2.0;
When asking database related questions, please give other posters
some clues, like operating system, version of db being used and DDL.
The exact text and/or number of error messages is useful (!= "it didn't work!").
Thanks.
Furthermore, As a courtesy to those who spend
time analysing and attempting to help, please
do not top post.|||DA Morgan <damorgan@.psoug.org> wrote:
>> but
>> the fact of the matter is that many companies pay for expensive db's
>> when in fact they are little more than bitbuckets.
>I have seen this too. But the solution is not to purchase an inadequate
>product. The solution is to replace inadequate IT management and, if
>necessary, inadequate IT staff.
What would your solution be in the case of a company that has to
support 4 db backends, with issues like clients who say "We've damn
well paid for X, so if your system doesn't do X, we'll purchase from
somebody who does"?
4 times the programming, 4 times the testing, the potential for the
introduction of bugs is increased almost exponentially.
>If you can use 3x5 cards don't buy a computer.
>If you can use a flat file don't use a commercial RDBMS
>But if data is a valuable asset it needs to be treated as one.
Oh, the data is valuable alright and in use by Blue Chip companies
across the world, many of whom would be clients of a certain large
aerospace manufacturing company situated in Washington State that you
can't talk about - United Airlines is an example of such client.
It could well be that the UA dba's are tearing their hair out, but
they're probably not the ones who made the purchasing decision about
the s/ware, and rocking the boat mightn't do their careers any good.
I once worked for a company that had paid approx. 500.000 dollars (+
50.000 a year support) for a programme that a colleague and I could
have written in 6 - 9 months (well, the functionality we actually
used, anyway). One of the tables had 35.000 (that's right thirty five
thousand fields) - when I tried to get the system dumped (most of what
it was supposed to be doing was in fact being done by people in Ops
using Excel), I was chastised when I was overpersistent. When I turned
in my resignation, the company folded 3 months later. The company that
sold the rubbish programme is celebrating it's 22nd birthday.
Paul...
plinehan __at__ yahoo __dot__ __com__
XP Pro, SP 2,
Oracle, 9.2.0.1.0 (Enterprise Ed.)
Interbase 6.0.2.0;
When asking database related questions, please give other posters
some clues, like operating system, version of db being used and DDL.
The exact text and/or number of error messages is useful (!= "it didn't work!").
Thanks.
Furthermore, As a courtesy to those who spend
time analysing and attempting to help, please
do not top post.|||"Paul" <paulsnewsgroups@.hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:68bu91d149m6oc9gsdrl07h363ies7muhn@.4ax.com...
>
> "Neil Truby" <neil.truby@.ardenta.com> wrote:
>
>>There is a very widespread perception that open-source operating systems -
>>RedHat for example - do not provide adequate support either. We have
>>encountered many risk-adverse users who would rather stick with Sun, HP or
>>IBM because of the absence of demarcation disputes between the OS and
>>hardware support vendors.
>
> Given that computers are becoming more and more of a commodity, that
> begs the question of why Red Hat doesn't supply PC's (for example) and
> guarantee both the hardware and s/ware. I believe that one can
> purchase Dell machines with Red Hat preinstalled - I would imagine
> that getting support for this config would not be difficult?
What a great example! I have a customer in Newcastle (under Lyme, not upon
Tyne) who is running OnLine on RedHat on Dell. Needless to say the Online
performs perfectly, but the box sporaically and spontaneously reboots.
RedHat say its a problem with the hardwre and they should upgrade the
firmware. Dell say it's a problem with the OS and they should patch it.
The customer wishes he'd bought IBM, or Sun, or HP ...
The point is you can buy support for it, but that doesn't avoid
inter-supplier finger-pointing ...|||Neil Truby wrote:
> There is a very widespread perception that open-source operating systems -
> RedHat for example - do not provide adequate support either. We have
> encountered many risk-adverse users who would rather stick with Sun, HP or
> IBM because of the absence of demarcation disputes between the OS and
> hardware support vendors.
Seen that too. I think that is one of the things fueling the interest in
Apple. An open source operating system that is fully supported.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||Paul wrote:
> Firebird is also very solid, having 20
> years of commercial development behind it.
But that is not enough. Here in the US one MUST think Sarbanes-Oxley.
If you are not you are at huge risk of finding yourself discussing
your lack of consideration with federal law enforcement officers while
under oath.
Systems that are "solid" are not necessarily SarbOx compliant. We are at
this moment watching a vendor whose upcoming product release seems to be
an unwitting attempt at self-destruction over what many are seeing
as an inability to be SarbOx compliant. The buzz is all over the big
accounting firms and consultancies right now.
Note: In an effort to keep flaming out of this thread no I will not name
the product.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||Paul wrote:
> "Neil Truby" <neil.truby@.ardenta.com> wrote:
>
> >There is a very widespread perception that open-source operating systems -
> >RedHat for example - do not provide adequate support either. We have
> >encountered many risk-adverse users who would rather stick with Sun, HP or
> >IBM because of the absence of demarcation disputes between the OS and
> >hardware support vendors.
>
> Given that computers are becoming more and more of a commodity, that
> begs the question of why Red Hat doesn't supply PC's (for example) and
> guarantee both the hardware and s/ware. I believe that one can
> purchase Dell machines with Red Hat preinstalled - I would imagine
> that getting support for this config would not be difficult?
they gotta do just the hardware first:
http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/comments/2004/10/22/81712/287/12
jg
--
@.home.com is bogus. "We thought it would be quite neat to do work on
piranhas because so little is known about them. But this notion that
they were fearsome fish, frightened of nothing - we had to revise
that. They're basically like regular fish - with large teeth." - Anne
Magurran|||Paul wrote:
>>I have seen this too. But the solution is not to purchase an inadequate
>>product. The solution is to replace inadequate IT management and, if
>>necessary, inadequate IT staff.
> What would your solution be in the case of a company that has to
> support 4 db backends, with issues like clients who say "We've damn
> well paid for X, so if your system doesn't do X, we'll purchase from
> somebody who does"?
> 4 times the programming, 4 times the testing, the potential for the
> introduction of bugs is increased almost exponentially.
US or other country? It matters.
In the US we invite the CFO to the meeting. We say something like this:
"The current system is not SarbOx compliant. Would you rather spend
money on being compliant with a federal law or risk going to jail."
So far not a single CFO I have met was willing to risk his or her own
neck. Nor would I in their position.
>>If you can use 3x5 cards don't buy a computer.
>>If you can use a flat file don't use a commercial RDBMS
>>But if data is a valuable asset it needs to be treated as one.
> Oh, the data is valuable alright and in use by Blue Chip companies
> across the world, many of whom would be clients of a certain large
> aerospace manufacturing company situated in Washington State that you
> can't talk about - United Airlines is an example of such client.
> It could well be that the UA dba's are tearing their hair out, but
> they're probably not the ones who made the purchasing decision about
> the s/ware, and rocking the boat mightn't do their careers any good.
> Paul...
No but on purely theoretical grounds, because I know we are NOT talking
about United Airlines, they MUST be compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley.
Compliance is not optional ... it is mandatory.
So refer to the simulated conversation above. Management can not and
will not break federal law to save a few dollars. It just isn't going
to happen. Not after Enron. Not after WorldCom. Not after ...
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||DA Morgan wrote:
> In the US we invite the CFO to the meeting. We say something like this:
> "The current system is not SarbOx compliant. Would you rather spend
> money on being compliant with a federal law or risk going to jail."
> So far not a single CFO I have met was willing to risk his or her own
> neck. Nor would I in their position.
>
Let's see a list of CFO names or company names where you have been
involved in a discussion like this or should we guess that this is
"hypothetical" or a contrived example.|||hpuxrac wrote:
> DA Morgan wrote:
>
>>In the US we invite the CFO to the meeting. We say something like this:
>>"The current system is not SarbOx compliant. Would you rather spend
>>money on being compliant with a federal law or risk going to jail."
>>So far not a single CFO I have met was willing to risk his or her own
>>neck. Nor would I in their position.
>
> Let's see a list of CFO names or company names where you have been
> involved in a discussion like this or should we guess that this is
> "hypothetical" or a contrived example.
Not contrived but protected by NDA when it comes to legal compliance
and security issues: This is legal compliance so the names will not
be divulged.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||DA Morgan wrote:
> Jurgen Haan wrote:
> There is another important reason too: Instrumentation. If they are
> slow diagnosing why is a question of making guesses. That may be a
> reasonable approach when supporting a small non-commercial web site.
> It is a non-starter when talking terabytes and a requirement for 7x24.
> And then there's that little problem with government requirements
> around audits. They just aren't ready for prime-time.
24x7 is actually no problem with OSS db's like Postgres.
At the company where I work we have a DB2 DB and a Postgres DB running.
Neither of them have to be taken down during maintenance.
Neither databases crash.
DB2 is way faster than Postgres. But as I stated earlier hardware is
getting faster in an enormous rate, making the speed less important
(note the less here, it will still be important).
The size of the database it not a problem with postgres, terrabyte
database... ok..
What's a big problem with postgres (and actually one of the main reasons
why we don't use it for our sensitive information) and that's that
postgres is extremely unrelyable in high TPS situations.
Scalability with OSS databases just plain sucks (if any).
But still I think OSS databases are to be reconed with.
It's the same as the early 90s, Linux, what a cute little project, but
it surely will never be of any importance. Now, just take a look a the
linux population among Internet web servers.
-R-|||In article <42a00a2f$0$29637$e4fe514c@.news.xs4all.nl>, jurgen@.fake.dom
says...
> DA Morgan wrote:
> > Jurgen Haan wrote:
> > There is another important reason too: Instrumentation. If they are
> > slow diagnosing why is a question of making guesses. That may be a
> > reasonable approach when supporting a small non-commercial web site.
> > It is a non-starter when talking terabytes and a requirement for 7x24.
> > And then there's that little problem with government requirements
> > around audits. They just aren't ready for prime-time.
> 24x7 is actually no problem with OSS db's like Postgres.
> At the company where I work we have a DB2 DB and a Postgres DB running.
> Neither of them have to be taken down during maintenance.
We've run a number of plants that produce all sorts of products for
places like Kellogs and Nabisco on SQL Server 7 and 2000 and they run
24x7x365 and do so for years.
I also know of a number of car part JIT vendors that use SQL Server with
10,000+ transactions per day, yea, it's not a lot, but it's still
running for years without a problem.
--
--
spam999free@.rrohio.com
remove 999 in order to email me|||There is a great blog entry on why you shouldn't pay attention to
industry analysts at http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/leadership|||DA Morgan <damorgan@.psoug.org> wrote:
>> Oh, the data is valuable alright and in use by Blue Chip companies
>> across the world, many of whom would be clients of a certain large
>> aerospace manufacturing company situated in Washington State that you
>> can't talk about - United Airlines is an example of such client.
>> It could well be that the UA dba's are tearing their hair out, but
>> they're probably not the ones who made the purchasing decision about
>> the s/ware, and rocking the boat mightn't do their careers any good.
>No but on purely theoretical grounds, because I know we are NOT talking
>about United Airlines, they MUST be compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley.
>Compliance is not optional ... it is mandatory.
Maybe they are compliant? Why does using a db as a bitbucket make you
uncompliant? (DRI is enforced in the creation scripts). Maybe you
could point me to a site that gives an overview of Sarbanes-Oxley for
the non-specialist accountant (obviously I can Google, but you might
have a good one handy?).
I know for a fact that this company has UA as a client, but there may
be wheels within wheels - web interfaces that connect to systems
(which may be outside the US or may not be) and which take data from
them (possibly old mainframe TPF type systems) which are possibly
compliant? I'm not exactly sure where the buck stops and I would
imagine that there would be lots of fingerpointing if anyone was
looking at any time in the slammer. Suits and countersuits... maybe I
should have done law?
>So refer to the simulated conversation above. Management can not and
>will not break federal law to save a few dollars. It just isn't going
>to happen. Not after Enron. Not after WorldCom. Not after ...
As I said, I'm not privy to the higher echelons of the arrangements
these companies have made with each other - if you're interested I
could give you a brief outline offline...
Paul...
plinehan __at__ yahoo __dot__ __com__
XP Pro, SP 2,
Oracle, 9.2.0.1.0 (Enterprise Ed.)
Interbase 6.0.2.0;
When asking database related questions, please give other posters
some clues, like operating system, version of db being used and DDL.
The exact text and/or number of error messages is useful (!= "it didn't work!").
Thanks.
Furthermore, As a courtesy to those who spend
time analysing and attempting to help, please
do not top post.|||Now Ingres is ready to kick Oracle's butt, or at least that's what
they claim.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1823158,00.asp|||Paul wrote:
> Maybe they are compliant? Why does using a db as a bitbucket make you
> uncompliant? (DRI is enforced in the creation scripts). Maybe you
> could point me to a site that gives an overview of Sarbanes-Oxley for
> the non-specialist accountant (obviously I can Google, but you might
> have a good one handy?).
I assume they are. The point is auditability. The ability to identify
everyone that has touched the data, how they touched it, why they
touched it, and the source of the transation. And done in a way that
can not be circumvented. And that is the key. Any system that allows a
DBA to log in and insert, update, or delete and not be logged is a
potential legal issue.
>>So refer to the simulated conversation above. Management can not and
>>will not break federal law to save a few dollars. It just isn't going
>>to happen. Not after Enron. Not after WorldCom. Not after ...
> As I said, I'm not privy to the higher echelons of the arrangements
> these companies have made with each other - if you're interested I
> could give you a brief outline offline...
> Paul...
Not necessary but I never lack for interest if you are so inclined.
Regards,
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||Redhat say upgrade the firmware..I assume it fixes something...SO DO
IT..
If problem persists...get Dell to quote required OS patches and apply
them.
If Dell just quote a specific OS issue then quote that back to Redhat.
If it's a known issue then Dell and/or Redhat should be able to quote
required
patches.
If it is still a problem then Redhat should be able to put in more
logging
to give problem details. Dell should be able to help after all how do
firmware
patches get created?|||david@.smooth1.co.uk wrote:
> Redhat say upgrade the firmware..I assume it fixes something...SO DO
> IT..
> If problem persists...get Dell to quote required OS patches and apply
> them.
> If Dell just quote a specific OS issue then quote that back to Redhat.
> If it's a known issue then Dell and/or Redhat should be able to quote
> required
> patches.
> If it is still a problem then Redhat should be able to put in more
> logging
> to give problem details. Dell should be able to help after all how do
> firmware
> patches get created?
And then seriously consider tossing them both out the door and
purchasing hardware and operating system from the same company.
And I don't need to repeat the name of my current recommendation:
Do I. ;-)
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||Leythos wrote:
> ... they run 24x7x365 and do so for years.
At least seven years at a time if your claim is correct...
:-)
It probably means you're still on Windows 98, too; remarkable!
--
Jonathan Leffler #include <disclaimer.h>
Email: jleffler@.earthlink.net, jleffler@.us.ibm.com
Guardian of DBD::Informix v2005.01 -- http://dbi.perl.org/|||<david@.smooth1.co.uk> wrote in message
news:1117837690.805470.259020@.z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
>
> Redhat say upgrade the firmware..I assume it fixes something...SO DO
> IT..
> If problem persists...get Dell to quote required OS patches and apply
> them.
> If Dell just quote a specific OS issue then quote that back to Redhat.
> If it's a known issue then Dell and/or Redhat should be able to quote
> required
> patches.
> If it is still a problem then Redhat should be able to put in more
> logging
> to give problem details. Dell should be able to help after all how do
> firmware
> patches get created?
I don't know if this irony, David. I suspect not. But either way, I think
illustrates well the actual point I was trying to make: that there remains a
widespread perceptiona mongst serious corporations that you're asking for
Support Hell if you buy an OS not supplied by he hardware manufacturer.|||DA Morgan wrote:
> There is another important reason too: Instrumentation. If they are
> slow diagnosing why is a question of making guesses. That may be a
> reasonable approach when supporting a small non-commercial web site.
> It is a non-starter when talking terabytes and a requirement for 7x24.
A rather depressing thought is that the reason many of these open
source platforms are gaining popularity are a general and widespread
lack of understanding of the essentials of performance engineering.
That eyeballing utilization and ratios are enough.
Part of my job is to firefight important projects that use my
employer's technology (BEA). I find the "task forces" are formed with
the various vendors and don't actually wind up finding the problem --
they just look under their own rock, and give the thumbs up, and point
fingers to the other guy. It's hard to get a disciplined focus on the
end-to-end service and wait times.
Usually when I come in, I find the problem is "good J2EE 101" or "good
Oracle 101"; stuff that Tom Kyte has pointed out for years: Java
developers not using bind variables, developers building extremely
chatty systems (18 small round trips instead of 1 larger one), lack of
statement caches to avoid parsing, not collecting statistics regularly
and properly, etc. And management, desperate to show some kind of
action to their executives, just decide to add hardware. I can't blame
them, though they usually are aghast when I'm brought in and suggest
that this may even make the situation worse.
I look at the MySQL's and JBoss' of the world, and I see a focus on a
particular audience of developers whose itches are being scratched: the
shiny, stylish, and inexpensive environment that requires "just enough"
in-depth knowledge to keep the developer around to run the thing. But
when problems creep up outside their domain, all hell breaks loose.
Cheers
Stu|||Neil Truby wrote:
> I don't know if this irony, David. I suspect not. But either way, I think
> illustrates well the actual point I was trying to make: that there remains a
> widespread perceptiona mongst serious corporations that you're asking for
> Support Hell if you buy an OS not supplied by he hardware manufacturer.
Likely based on real-world experience.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||Stu Charlton wrote:
> DA Morgan wrote:
>
>>There is another important reason too: Instrumentation. If they are
>>slow diagnosing why is a question of making guesses. That may be a
>>reasonable approach when supporting a small non-commercial web site.
>>It is a non-starter when talking terabytes and a requirement for 7x24.
>
> A rather depressing thought is that the reason many of these open
> source platforms are gaining popularity are a general and widespread
> lack of understanding of the essentials of performance engineering.
> That eyeballing utilization and ratios are enough.
> Part of my job is to firefight important projects that use my
> employer's technology (BEA). I find the "task forces" are formed with
> the various vendors and don't actually wind up finding the problem --
> they just look under their own rock, and give the thumbs up, and point
> fingers to the other guy. It's hard to get a disciplined focus on the
> end-to-end service and wait times.
> Usually when I come in, I find the problem is "good J2EE 101" or "good
> Oracle 101"; stuff that Tom Kyte has pointed out for years: Java
> developers not using bind variables, developers building extremely
> chatty systems (18 small round trips instead of 1 larger one), lack of
> statement caches to avoid parsing, not collecting statistics regularly
> and properly, etc. And management, desperate to show some kind of
> action to their executives, just decide to add hardware. I can't blame
> them, though they usually are aghast when I'm brought in and suggest
> that this may even make the situation worse.
> I look at the MySQL's and JBoss' of the world, and I see a focus on a
> particular audience of developers whose itches are being scratched: the
> shiny, stylish, and inexpensive environment that requires "just enough"
> in-depth knowledge to keep the developer around to run the thing. But
> when problems creep up outside their domain, all hell breaks loose.
> Cheers
> Stu
Precisely duplicates my experiences.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||Stu Charlton wrote:
> > The number of downloads is probably a better measure of the influence
> > of open source products. Trying to use capitalization or revenue as a
> > yardstick is problematical.
> Agreed, but arguably "number of downloads" is moreso. I remember back
> during the dot-com boom, that was how ISVs measured their success.
> Didn't get them very far...
The first example that comes to mind is the Java Developer Kit. Because
it was a free download, you couldn't look to Sun financials for "JDK
sales" as an accurate measure of Java adoption. In the ramp-up period
for Java, Sun regularly publicized the number of JDK downloads as a
measure of Java's growing popularity.
> > The economic effect of open source isn't limited to direct revenue from
> > licenses and support contracts. Companies that manufacture computers
> > know that open source contributes to the revenue stream from selling
> > hardware (e.g., 40 million web servers running Apache).
> Great, but since the only major integrated hardware & software
> companies are Sun & IBM, that's a rather limited set of companies.
Your integrated hardware & software company list is too narrow. For
example, HP's quarterly revenue from software was $277 million. That's
$205 million more than Borland's most recent quarterly revenue.
The more fundamental question is why you'd want to use an "integrated
hardware & software company" prism when looking at the effect of open
source software on hardware revenues.
Not every organization buying hardware to run Linux and Apache web
server will limit its vendor choices to only IBM and Sun because they
are integrated hardware and software companies.
> Whither the ISV? What happens to Oracle, Symantec/Veritas, BEA, etc?
Open source clearly has a different impact on software companies than
on hardware vendors. If you're selling Xeon server boxes and RAID
farms, your revenue isn't likely to decline if there's a net gain of 6
million in the number of users of the Linux/Apache/JBoss combination.
On the other hand, if you're selling application server software, the
Linux/Apache/JBoss combo is a threat. Look at BEA's numbers for 2003
and 2004:
http://www.sqlsummit.com/Trends/AppServerMarket.htm|||Neil Truby wrote:
> "Jurgen Haan" <jurgen@.fake.dom> wrote in message
> news:429f0643$0$17153$e4fe514c@.news.xs4all.nl...
>>Stu Charlton wrote:
>>So the question is whether OSS eventually sucks the direct revenue out
>>of the market. If there are enough vested interests to fund that sort
>>of effort, sure, it could happen. Apache is a great example of that
>>effect. I think the next area probably will be operating systems.
>>Databases will take longer, if ever.
>>
>>I think databases will happen sooner than you think.
>>Hardware is getting cheaper while getting faster,
>>storage is getting cheaper while getting faster
>>OSS Databases are getting faster and more stable while still being free.
>>The one point missing in OSS databases is support.
>>It's so damn hard to get any support on OSS databases.
>>That's why many companies still go for the mainstream databases,
>>for the false sense of safety (I pay for it so it must be good) and for
>>the support (which I still think is one of the most important issues).
>
> There is a very widespread perception that open-source operating systems -
> RedHat for example - do not provide adequate support either. We have
> encountered many risk-adverse users who would rather stick with Sun, HP or
> IBM because of the absence of demarcation disputes between the OS and
> hardware support vendors.
>
RedHat is not Linux. RedHat is RedHat-Linux, a fork in the road. But I
will say RedHat has provide me with excellent phone support, with a rather
short wait-time. RH lacks a lot of admin tools, and requires a bit more
hands-on than say SuSE, so you might find yourself using the support more
at first till you get comfortable with their limited, but usable tools.
RH does have some benefits in terms of how you can manage networking, but
it isn't necessarily better than SuSE, because you have to know what you're
doing. Not acceptable in new-to-Linux environments or for those risk-adverse
environments. Fedora is a great way to get into RedHat Linux because it
doesn't really cost anything. Of course you can get SuSE Pro for around
$99 USD so the question really becomes, how much will we want to support
it for ourselves. To the extreme, you can go Linux-From-Scratch and
really DIY ( www.linuxfromscratch.org ) but you will really learn Linux.
Use SuSE and get the support with it. SuSE has excellent admin tools
and allows your people to be successful with Linux and make it work
quickly without that queasy feeling that it isn't going to work. SuSE has
been excellent support on every single client I know that uses it. They
respond quickly and typically are spot on in problem solving. IBM has been
pushing "SuSE certified" systems for some time now, so you get a lot of
support not only from SuSE, but also from IBM.
To be sure you can expect problems with any release of Linux, but you should
have someone on staff that can help you as well as a support contract. The
nice thing about SuSE is that they really only have two products, one for
workstations that actually can be a server ( Pro ), and the other is a server
product that requires a support contract or you can't really update it unless
you really want to support it yourself ( SLES ). SLES has a lot of the
features you'd expect for a corporate server environment, deeper SCSI
support, etc. I think the latest release has morphed into a better
product with Novell networking built-in, which is even better, if you
are looking for that kind of product.|||david@.smooth1.co.uk wrote:
> Redhat say upgrade the firmware..I assume it fixes something...SO DO
> IT..
> If problem persists...get Dell to quote required OS patches and apply
> them.
> If Dell just quote a specific OS issue then quote that back to Redhat.
> If it's a known issue then Dell and/or Redhat should be able to quote
> required
> patches.
> If it is still a problem then Redhat should be able to put in more
> logging
> to give problem details. Dell should be able to help after all how do
> firmware
> patches get created?
>
We did not have this problem when using SuSE Linux--or Gentoo for that
matter on our Dell servers.
Dell has a mailing list you can subscribe to that will provide you
with input from a lot of heavy-hitters who use Linux on Dell, in
addition to using paid support. Much of the problems with Linux on
Dell have to do with RedHat, not necessarily Dell. It's like any
hardware platform, sometimes it's the hardware, or software or both.
Head over to Dell's Linux support website, and subscribe to their
list for a while and you can see what people are saying--and you
can ask them what they would recommend before actually using Dell
and Linux. Dell has been pretty good at improving their Linux
support, but they have been mostly RedHat because of their resistance
to support more than one Linux version--which points to a lack of
understanding or really digging into Linux because the bulk of their
sales is on Windows. When more shops use something else besides
RedHat they will get the message and start to support other releases.|||DA Morgan <damorgan@.psoug.org> writes:
> Neil Truby wrote:
>> "DA Morgan" <damorgan@.psoug.org> wrote in message
>> news:1117485555.324290@.yasure...
>>Larry wrote:
>>Daniel,
>> What makes this year different from any other? It's always
>> backwards-looking, but that's the only way to capture actual
>> data.
>>
>>Gartner also makes predictions. Not accurate ones but predictions.
>> Don't know if it's the same in the US, but over here in Blighty the
>> supposedly independent analysts Gartner have attracted a lot of
>> criticism for advocating off-shoring in their editorials whilst at
>> the same time having an active consultancy arm that, er, helps
>> companies off-shore!
> In my opinion, and it is only "my" opinion ... Gartner Group has the
> ethics of a great white shark in a feeding frenzy. Not sure about
> "here in Blighty" but they are most certainly a blight: If not a boil.
They have a history of having opinions in keeping with the sorts of
monies flowing towards them.
I remember starting to _really_ disbelieve them when their "Itanium
everywhere" opinions started coming out back in about 2000.
I daresay I haven't yet seen a single Itanium system deployed. I
gather that they exist, but in such tiny quantities as to be not of
commercial importance.
--
"cbbrowne","@.","ca.afilias.info"
<http://dev6.int.libertyrms.com/>
Christopher Browne
(416) 673-4124 (land)|||Paul <paulsnewsgroups@.hotmail.com> writes:
> That has to be market share in some shape or form, but was
> completely ignored in the article which only mentioned PostgreSQL,
> and even then only provided a link, with no mention of its market
> share!
It is also an unmeaningful question in that the notion of "market
share" is difficult to formulate for a piece of software which, since
it does not have any organization that owns the right to licensing
fees, doesn't realistically factor in to have a well-defined notion of
either "market" or "share" of that market.
If it isn't "sold," then using the term "market" is misleading, at
best...
--
"cbbrowne","@.","ca.afilias.info"
<http://dev6.int.libertyrms.com/>
Christopher Browne
(416) 673-4124 (land)|||Paul <paulsnewsgroups@.hotmail.com> writes:
> DA Morgan <damorgan@.psoug.org> wrote:
>>There is another important reason too: Instrumentation. If they are
>>slow diagnosing why is a question of making guesses. That may be a
>>reasonable approach when supporting a small non-commercial web site.
>>It is a non-starter when talking terabytes and a requirement for 7x24.
>>And then there's that little problem with government requirements
>>around audits. They just aren't ready for prime-time.
> I have worked for a company (big player in its field) and had an
> interview with another (a giant in its field) where they had systems
> that ran on all of the major db's - SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and
> Sybase.
> These db's contain(ed) neither triggers, SPs, PL/SQL, Transact SQL
> or any other proprietary features of any of these db's. The only
> coding that varied between the db's was how to get an
> autoinc/generator/sequence value and that was in some sort of middle
> layer. They did make use of DRI in the db creation scripts.
> I'm not saying that that's a good thing (in fact I'm appalled), but
> the fact of the matter is that many companies pay for expensive db's
> when in fact they are little more than bitbuckets. I think that it's
> only a matter of time before the IT industry is going to wake up to
> the reality that (at least as far as *_I_* have seen) very little of
> the capacity of an Oracle or DB2 is actually being used and make the
> switch to cheaper or Open Source db's.
You may want Oracle's instrumentation for terabyte-sized DBs requiring
plenty-o-nines' uptime, but there are a whole lot of instances of
"departmental" applications out there which are quite amenable to the
'leap' to free software databases.
For applications that are mostly used during office hours by the
limited population of staff within a department, you don't get a lot
of value out of the difference in licensing costs between Firebird or
PostgreSQL and Oracle.
And there are plenty of those sorts of applications around.
--
(format nil "~S@.~S" "cbbrowne" "acm.org")
http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/sap.html
Rules of the Evil Overlord #78. "I will not tell my Legions of Terror
"And he must be taken alive!" The command will be: ``And try to take
him alive if it is reasonably practical.''"
<http://www.eviloverlord.com/>|||You folks might want to get the online version of this
magazine:
http://www.eosj.com
They are talking about many of the myths-n-shit you guys are
propagating. This issue is one you won't want to miss.
Chris Browne wrote:
> Paul <paulsnewsgroups@.hotmail.com> writes:
> > DA Morgan <damorgan@.psoug.org> wrote:
> >>There is another important reason too: Instrumentation. If they are
> >>slow diagnosing why is a question of making guesses. That may be a
> >>reasonable approach when supporting a small non-commercial web site.
> >>It is a non-starter when talking terabytes and a requirement for 7x24.
> >>And then there's that little problem with government requirements
> >>around audits. They just aren't ready for prime-time.
> >
> > I have worked for a company (big player in its field) and had an
> > interview with another (a giant in its field) where they had systems
> > that ran on all of the major db's - SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and
> > Sybase.
> >
> > These db's contain(ed) neither triggers, SPs, PL/SQL, Transact SQL
> > or any other proprietary features of any of these db's. The only
> > coding that varied between the db's was how to get an
> > autoinc/generator/sequence value and that was in some sort of middle
> > layer. They did make use of DRI in the db creation scripts.
> >
> > I'm not saying that that's a good thing (in fact I'm appalled), but
> > the fact of the matter is that many companies pay for expensive db's
> > when in fact they are little more than bitbuckets. I think that it's
> > only a matter of time before the IT industry is going to wake up to
> > the reality that (at least as far as *_I_* have seen) very little of
> > the capacity of an Oracle or DB2 is actually being used and make the
> > switch to cheaper or Open Source db's.
> You may want Oracle's instrumentation for terabyte-sized DBs requiring
> plenty-o-nines' uptime, but there are a whole lot of instances of
> "departmental" applications out there which are quite amenable to the
> 'leap' to free software databases.
> For applications that are mostly used during office hours by the
> limited population of staff within a department, you don't get a lot
> of value out of the difference in licensing costs between Firebird or
> PostgreSQL and Oracle.
> And there are plenty of those sorts of applications around.
> --
> (format nil "~S@.~S" "cbbrowne" "acm.org")
> http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/sap.html
> Rules of the Evil Overlord #78. "I will not tell my Legions of Terror
> "And he must be taken alive!" The command will be: ``And try to take
> him alive if it is reasonably practical.''"
> <http://www.eviloverlord.com/>|||Jurgen Haan wrote:
> DA Morgan wrote:
> > Jurgen Haan wrote:
> > There is another important reason too: Instrumentation. If they are
> > slow diagnosing why is a question of making guesses. That may be a
> > reasonable approach when supporting a small non-commercial web site.
> > It is a non-starter when talking terabytes and a requirement for 7x24.
> > And then there's that little problem with government requirements
> > around audits. They just aren't ready for prime-time.
> 24x7 is actually no problem with OSS db's like Postgres.
> At the company where I work we have a DB2 DB and a Postgres DB running.
> Neither of them have to be taken down during maintenance.
Next week I get to swap out two storage arrays on a 500-gbyte db2 udb
database server: the new arrays are larger and faster. Anyhow, one
nice feature about db2 is that I can add the new arrays & remove the
old ones in a relatively simple operation in which the database handles
rebalancing all data automatically, and everything is online the entire
time. Didn't think postgresql was up to that yet.
> What's a big problem with postgres (and actually one of the main reasons
> why we don't use it for our sensitive information) and that's that
> postgres is extremely unrelyable in high TPS situations.
> Scalability with OSS databases just plain sucks (if any).
Although I really like postgesql, the biggest reasons not to use it in
production for us are:
1. If it can't do everything then we need db2 as well. Standardizing
on db2 is simpler than maintaining a mix of skills, procedures,
products, etc.
2. postgresql doesn't support query parallelism or partitioning. This
means that db2 table scans run about 40x the speed of postgresql table
scans (assuming a 4-way server and typical partitioning benefits).
3. db2 is pretty inexpensive in its small-server editions (workgroup,
express, etc). So the savings of going with postgresql is more than
wiped out by the additional hardware requirements.
> But still I think OSS databases are to be reconed with.
> It's the same as the early 90s, Linux, what a cute little project, but
> it surely will never be of any importance. Now, just take a look a the
> linux population among Internet web servers.
Yep, postgresql is on track to be a cool DBMS.
buck|||Data Goob wrote:
> You folks might want to get the online version of this
> magazine:
> http://www.eosj.com
> They are talking about many of the myths-n-shit you guys are
> propagating. This issue is one you won't want to miss.
It uses a bizzare page reader and does not work very well with Firefox.
But they sure mention IE!!!!
>
>
> Chris Browne wrote:
>>Paul <paulsnewsgroups@.hotmail.com> writes:
>>DA Morgan <damorgan@.psoug.org> wrote:
>>There is another important reason too: Instrumentation. If they are
>>slow diagnosing why is a question of making guesses. That may be a
>>reasonable approach when supporting a small non-commercial web site.
>>It is a non-starter when talking terabytes and a requirement for 7x24.
>>And then there's that little problem with government requirements
>>around audits. They just aren't ready for prime-time.
>>I have worked for a company (big player in its field) and had an
>>interview with another (a giant in its field) where they had systems
>>that ran on all of the major db's - SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and
>>Sybase.
>>These db's contain(ed) neither triggers, SPs, PL/SQL, Transact SQL
>>or any other proprietary features of any of these db's. The only
>>coding that varied between the db's was how to get an
>>autoinc/generator/sequence value and that was in some sort of middle
>>layer. They did make use of DRI in the db creation scripts.
>>I'm not saying that that's a good thing (in fact I'm appalled), but
>>the fact of the matter is that many companies pay for expensive db's
>>when in fact they are little more than bitbuckets. I think that it's
>>only a matter of time before the IT industry is going to wake up to
>>the reality that (at least as far as *_I_* have seen) very little of
>>the capacity of an Oracle or DB2 is actually being used and make the
>>switch to cheaper or Open Source db's.
>>You may want Oracle's instrumentation for terabyte-sized DBs requiring
>>plenty-o-nines' uptime, but there are a whole lot of instances of
>>"departmental" applications out there which are quite amenable to the
>>'leap' to free software databases.
>>For applications that are mostly used during office hours by the
>>limited population of staff within a department, you don't get a lot
>>of value out of the difference in licensing costs between Firebird or
>>PostgreSQL and Oracle.
>>And there are plenty of those sorts of applications around.
>>--
>>(format nil "~S@.~S" "cbbrowne" "acm.org")
>>http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/sap.html
>>Rules of the Evil Overlord #78. "I will not tell my Legions of Terror
>>"And he must be taken alive!" The command will be: ``And try to take
>>him alive if it is reasonably practical.''"
>><http://www.eviloverlord.com/>
>|||Data Goob wrote:
>>For applications that are mostly used during office hours by the
>>limited population of staff within a department, you don't get a lot
>>of value out of the difference in licensing costs between Firebird or
>>PostgreSQL and Oracle.
What planet do you reside on?
For those of us in the US.
If those apps involve any medical information you MUST comply with HIPAA.
If those apps involve any financial information including projections,
assets, liabilities, inventories, etc. you MUST comply with Sarbanes
Oxley.
If you have more than 0 employees you MUST comply with the regulations
published last Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission.
Ignore any of the above you your attorney will be looking for a
retainer. Oh and that will be for criminal defense ... not civil
litigation if you attract the wrong kind of attention.
Do you think you can comply with those laws with Firebird?
I can answer that for you.
How abot PostgreSQL?
Same answer.
You'd better be thinking Oracle, DB2, or Informix or you had better not
be lecturing others about their bad habits and criticizing others that
break the law.
So yes ... if you are storing your mother's cookie recipies I would
think you'd be pretty safe in the open source databases to which you
refer.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||Buck Nuggets wrote:
> Next week I get to swap out two storage arrays on a 500-gbyte db2 udb
> database server: the new arrays are larger and faster. Anyhow, one
> nice feature about db2 is that I can add the new arrays & remove the
> old ones in a relatively simple operation in which the database handles
> rebalancing all data automatically, and everything is online the entire
> time. Didn't think postgresql was up to that yet.
>
Postgres doesn't have to be. The storage arrays are getting smarter
aswell. Take the NetApp storage array, you can expand, reassign disks to
a logical volume, resize a logical volume online.
And I'm not sure if it can be done online, but the head (the controller
part) should be hotswappable aswell. This way you can upgrade your 1TB
netapp to a 6TB netapp.
But if you're using a simpler array, a simple SAN or NAS, it's indeed
very pleasant to have the ability available in your database.
-R-|||knorth wrote:
> > Agreed, but arguably "number of downloads" is moreso. I remember back
> > during the dot-com boom, that was how ISVs measured their success.
> > Didn't get them very far...
> The first example that comes to mind is the Java Developer Kit. Because
> it was a free download, you couldn't look to Sun financials for "JDK
> sales" as an accurate measure of Java adoption. In the ramp-up period
> for Java, Sun regularly publicized the number of JDK downloads as a
> measure of Java's growing popularity.
And it's absolutely a great measure of growth when you're dealing with
a level of explosivity as Java was. Fastest growing language /
platform in computing history, and all that jazz.
Still, Sun (the company) hasn't been directly assisted by that model.
Indirectly, by association, yes: they sold more hardware due to Java.
And in the early days, through Java licenses.
All of this points to the difficulty any traditional ISV will have if
they go OSS. Hence why most of them stay proprietary.
> > Great, but since the only major integrated hardware & software
> > companies are Sun & IBM, that's a rather limited set of companies.
> Your integrated hardware & software company list is too narrow. For
> example, HP's quarterly revenue from software was $277 million. That's
> $205 million more than Borland's most recent quarterly revenue.
I should have counted HP, yes.
> The more fundamental question is why you'd want to use an "integrated
> hardware & software company" prism when looking at the effect of open
> source software on hardware revenues.
> Not every organization buying hardware to run Linux and Apache web
> server will limit its vendor choices to only IBM and Sun because they
> are integrated hardware and software companies.
I look at it because someone has to pay for the software development.
The commercial OSS distributions (MySQL, Linux, etc.) are funded
through investment capital and subsidies from the hardware side of the
business.
The first approach (capital) requires a return on investment. That
usually implies a direct return, through support or professional
services. So, unless the OSS ISV becomes a support and
consulting/contracting company, it's going to have troubles meeting its
investor's desires, given how little license revenue one gets from OSS
(MySQL's ~$10m vs. Oracle's billions).
The second approach requires continued purchasing of hardware. I.e.
the software goes back to the old days of the mainframe industry and is
just "value added" to the box. It's obvious such an approach is only
sustainable as long as people buy your hardware because they love your
software. Apple is an example of this working, Sun is the counter
example.
My overall point is that OSS volunteerism can certainly support the
platforms indefinitely, but the rate of innovation will shrink if such
subsidies and capital shrinks. Companies will buy what they need.
Thus traditional ISVs may not be so dead after all.
Unless of course, the entire industry moves to a "services" model. I
know OSS advocates love this, but I don't think they really understand
the horror it implies in reality. It doesn't mean better engineered
systems, or cheaper systems, or more freedom for enterprises. It means
"Buy our software, which doesn't really work out of the box, and get a
busload of IT college graduates + 1 princpal consultant (aka.
"babysitter") for only $10m more!"
If they can't lock you in through copyright, they'll lock you in by
withholding knowledge. Which in theory sounds like meritocratic tech
utopia, until you realize the gatekeepers are the partners at the Big 5
consultancies, not Smarty Programming Wizard Independent Consultants.
> On the other hand, if you're selling application server software, the
> Linux/Apache/JBoss combo is a threat. Look at BEA's numbers for 2003
> and 2004:
> http://www.sqlsummit.com/Trends/AppServerMarket.htm
While BEA's share certainly is impacted by JBoss, it's unlikely that
was the primary or only source.
Oracle's Application Server, for example, have made good inroads, and
they're just as much an ISV (but much bigger) and just as proprietary.
Fujitsu also made inroads, but they're hybrid hardware/software , and
not OSS.
The application server market has become psychologically commoditized;
in reality, people tend to stick with the applicaiton server they
picked in the first place. Time will tell if it becomes truly a
commodity or remains differentiated , just like all those other
software areas people said were becoming commodities: databases
(nope), operating systems (MS still at 95%), security (NAS and
Symantec), etc.
It takes a lot of work and a lot of coordination to make enterprise
software, it belittles the complexity of all of this to suggest that
differentiation won't continue to be the market driver.
Cheers
Stu|||Daniel,
Just for the record, and not to take anything away from Capt. Pedantic,
I did not write what you are responding to. Somebody else wrote
it, please take a moment to go back and figure out who it was you are
responding to, they might want to say something back.
DA Morgan wrote:
> Data Goob wrote:
>> For applications that are mostly used during office hours by the
>> limited population of staff within a department, you don't get a lot
>> of value out of the difference in licensing costs between Firebird or
>> PostgreSQL and Oracle.
>
> What planet do you reside on?
> For those of us in the US.
> If those apps involve any medical information you MUST comply with HIPAA.
> If those apps involve any financial information including projections,
> assets, liabilities, inventories, etc. you MUST comply with Sarbanes
> Oxley.
> If you have more than 0 employees you MUST comply with the regulations
> published last Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission.
> Ignore any of the above you your attorney will be looking for a
> retainer. Oh and that will be for criminal defense ... not civil
> litigation if you attract the wrong kind of attention.
> Do you think you can comply with those laws with Firebird?
> I can answer that for you.
> How abot PostgreSQL?
> Same answer.
> You'd better be thinking Oracle, DB2, or Informix or you had better not
> be lecturing others about their bad habits and criticizing others that
> break the law.
> So yes ... if you are storing your mother's cookie recipies I would
> think you'd be pretty safe in the open source databases to which you
> refer.|||Data Goob wrote:
> Daniel,
> Just for the record, and not to take anything away from Capt. Pedantic,
> I did not write what you are responding to. Somebody else wrote
> it, please take a moment to go back and figure out who it was you are
> responding to, they might want to say something back.
> DA Morgan wrote:
>> Data Goob wrote:
I am in San Francisco this week at WWDC so my ability to do so is rather
limited. If you think it is important I'd appreciate your making any
corrections. I expect whoever actually posted it will, if interested,
read the thread, recognize their work, and respond.
Thanks.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)|||Paul wrote:
> Maybe you could point me to a site that gives an overview of Sarbanes-Oxley for
> the non-specialist accountant
"Sarbanes-Oxley Responsibilities and Techniques for Compliance"
http://www.sqlsummit.com/SOX.htm
The author is a CPA and CISA with a lot of experience doing
SOX-compliance work.
Ken North
===============www.SQLSummit.com
www.GridSummit.com
www.WebServicesSummit.com|||What planet do you reside on?
For those of us in the US.
If those apps involve any medical information you MUST comply with
HIPAA.
If those apps involve any financial information including projections,
assets, liabilities, inventories, etc. you MUST comply with Sarbanes
Oxley.
If you have more than 0 employees you MUST comply with the regulations
published last Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission.
Ignore any of the above you your attorney will be looking for a
retainer. Oh and that will be for criminal defense ... not civil
litigation if you attract the wrong kind of attention.
Do you think you can comply with those laws with Firebird?
I can answer that for you.
How abot PostgreSQL?
Same answer.
You'd better be thinking Oracle, DB2, or Informix or you had better not
be lecturing others about their bad habits and criticizing others that
break the law.
So yes ... if you are storing your mother's cookie recipies I would
think you'd be pretty safe in the open source databases to which you
refer.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damor...@.x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond
You know for someone who talks like they understand subjects it is
clear that you don't know much more than some of the buzzwords.
Are you a lawyer? What law school did you graduate from? What states
are you licensed to practice in?
Are there differences between publicly traded companies and not? How
and where exactly do these differences start manifesting themselves?
Why don't you keep to butchering a subject like oracle and go back to
advising people about dropping the dba role?|||>> My overall point is that OSS volunteerism can certainly support the
platforms indefinitely, but the rate of innovation will shrink if such
subsidies and capital shrinks.
Innovation propsers when there's diversity and lower barriers to entry.
During the late '80s and early '90s, Borland, Lotus Software,
WordPerfect and the SQL vendors prospered.
Today the situation is quite different. ISV's (for-profit companies)
face serious challenges.
Governments and computer manufacturers are pumping money into software
that competes with commercial products
Asian partners (Korea, Japan, China) have formed an alliance to promote
open-source software and Linux R&D. Computer companies such as HP, IBM,
Intel, Oracle and Sun have jumped on the Linux bandwagaon and signed
on Chinese Linux parters.
In a panel discussion last year, Jim Gray suggested "The thing I'm
puzzled by is how there will be a software industry if there's open
source." He went on to explain ""The key thing is [with] people who are
selling their software, the software has to somehow be better than the
free software and [if] it's not better, I'm puzzled as to what the
business model is because they can't sell it."|||rkusenet wrote:
> http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1820667,00.asp
>
>
> The database market grew by 10.3 percent in 2004, fueled largely by hunge=r for business
> intelligence and analytics, according to numbers released by the Gartner =Group on Monday.
> With 34.1 percent of the overall market, IBM holds a slim margin over its= closest
> competitor, Oracle Corp., which maintains 33.7 percent of the overall mar=ket. Microsoft
> Corp. follows up with 20 percent of the market. NCR Teradata Corp. contro=ls 2.9 percent,
> Sybase Inc. claims 2.3 percent and others hold 6.6 percent. ADVERTISEMENT
> The market growth figure doubles that of RDBMS (relational DBMS) market g=rowth in 2003,
> which was 5 percent, according to Gartner Inc.'s Colleen Graham, who auth=ored the report.
> "[The growth] came a lot from BI, data warehousing and data analysis," sh=e said. "You can
> tell that if you look at [NCR]; they had really strong growth, and they'r=e a
> data-warehousing database. That's where we're seeing a lot of this come f=rom."
> The market grew from just under $7.1 billion in 2003 to nearly $7.8 billi=on in terms of new
> license sales. The continuing weakness of the U.S. dollar artificially in=flated market
> growth to some degree, Graham said, accounting for some 3 to 4 percent of= overall growth.
> "[Overall market growth] was probably somewhere between 6 and 7 percent,"= she said, after
> considering that sales outside of the United States, when converted to U.=S=2E dollars,
> contributed more to vendor revenue because of currency conversion, as opp=osed to increased
> demand.
> Microsoft and Teradata led in terms of overall growth, with 18 percent an=d 17 percent,
> respectively. However, there was no clear winner in market share overall.= Because the
> difference between RDBMS revenue for IBM and Oracle was less than $30 mil=lion, it is
> statistically too close to declare a winner, according to the report, tit=led "No Clear
> Winner in Overall RDBMS Market Share Race."
> Read details here about Oracle's PIM Data Hub.
> Winner or no winner, vendors were quick to point out the rosy parts of th=e picture.
> Willie Hardie, Oracle's senior director of Database Product Marketing, fo=und evidence that
> the market is buying into the database company's grid vision and its push=ing of RAC (Real
> Application Clusters) clustering on commodity servers running on the Linu=x platform.
> "Forget about databases specifically and look at server sales," said Hard=ie, in Redwood
> Shores, Calif. "The growth market in servers is in small servers, with cl=ustering of small
> servers. That matches closely to Oracle's grid model: don't buy big serve=rs; cluster
> together boxes running Linux or Windows. No doubt there's a trend in the =industry moving in
> that direction, somewhat reflected in Oracle's growth in 2004."
> The market for RDBMS on Linux, meanwhile, is red-hot. While still a relat=ively small part of
> the overall RDBMS market, the Linux segment grew 118 percent in 2004, mor=e than doubling
> from $300 million in 2003 to more than $650 million in 2004.
> Gartner found that Oracle has a growing lead over IBM in this subsection =of the market, with
> growth of 155 percent. Oracle now controls 80.5 percent of the Linux RDBM=S market, up from
> 69 percent a year ago. IBM, meanwhile, slipped in 2004, coming to rest at= 16.5 percent of
> the market from year-ago figures of 28.4 percent of the market.
> The Gartner report pointed out that Linux RDBMS revenue includes sales of= Oracle 9i RAC,
> which adds about a 50 percent premium on top of regular RDBMS license fee=s for that company.
> Bob Picciano, vice president of database servers for IBM, said Oracle's g=rowing Linux lead
> is artificially puffed up by those add-on RAC fees. "What Oracle is doing= is, they're
> migrating their own Unix base to the Linux platform," said Picciano, in S=omers, N.Y. "In the
> process, they're increasing the cost of software to those clients, by int=roducing the cost
> of RAC."
> "Few users are acquiring Oracle for the Linux platform without the RAC op=tion," the Gartner
> report states. "Almost 20 percent to 30 percent of Oracle RAC deployments= are estimated to
> be on the Linux platform."
> Hardie said the demand for Linux shows no signs of abating, coming from v=irtually all the
> vertical industries and including implementations of data warehousing on =clustered RAC-that
> clearly not being a solution for the needs of a niche, he said.
> IBM is set to fight back with DB2 features that compete with RAC. In part=icular, the
> company's release of "Stinger," the next version of DB2, is optimized for= Version 2.6 of the
> Linux kernel, a move that's geared toward helping database clusters scale= higher and perform
> faster.
> It is also intended to better exploit the speed of 64-bit databases and s=ervers that rely on
> multiple processors.
> IBM's promise is that such multiprocessor servers can be joined in Linux =clusters, as with
> DB2 ICE (Integrated Cluster Environment), an integrated package that comb=ines DB2 and
> eServer Linux Cluster 1350 (xSeries, 325, BladeCenter) to provide a solut=ion that, according
> to IBM, can cluster from two to 1,000 servers and pick up nodes at the ra=te of four per
> hour.
> Picciano also pointed to Stinger's HADR (High Availability and Disaster R=ecovery) as being
> the key to IBM's ability to deliver high availability at a fraction of th=e cost of Oracle
> RAC.
> "With RAC, the client needs to license all the processors on both boxes, =and they need to
> license the RAC feature," he said. "With HADR, you pay for processors on =the primary [box]
> and for one processor on the standby box. So the cost savings is much gre=ater."
> Picciano said that HADR has helped IBM do battle in sales situations wher=e IBM and Microsoft
> are in the room. "We're winning 89.4 percent of the time we're engaging a=gainst Oracle and
> Microsoft" according to Q1 2005 numbers, he said, thanks not only to HADR= but also to a
> retrained sales team and the decision to price servers at the chip level =rather than the
> core level.
> Microsoft, predictably, scoffed at the growth of the Linux database marke=t=2E "Look at it:
> It's a small market," said Tom Rizzo, director of product management for =SQL Server. "You'd
> expect some growth there, from such a small base."
> Rizzo pointed to the healthy growth in the Windows database market as evi=dence that Windows
> is "eating away at the Linux camp" rather than the other way around. The =RDBMS market on the
> Windows server platform grew 10 percent in 2004. Microsoft's market share= grew 18 percent in
> this segment.
> Click here to read more about the increasing market share of open-source =database
> PostgreSQL.
> That gave Microsoft 50.9 percent of the Windows RDBMS market, up from 47.=4 percent in 2003.
> IBM posted a 4 percent decline in this market segment, which followed a n=early 12 percent
> decline in 2003-a slippage Gartner attributed to weak adoption of DB2 8.
> Graham said she was surprised to see Microsoft do so well, given that the= release of SQL
> Server 2005, code-named Yukon, has been delayed so often and so long.
> "We do our forecast and say 'OK, each of these vendors, which is coming o=ut with a new
> product? Where's each one been in the product lifecycle?'" she said. "To =see Microsoft have
> growth this strong, even before they release Yukon, that struck me as int=eresting. People
> aren't waiting."
> Much of Microsoft's success likely goes back to the overall interest in B=I, Graham said-a
> premise that Rizzo seconded. "BI is a tremendous growth driver for us, es=pecially Reporting
> Services, which we've seen a ton of customers buying and deploying," he s=aid.
> "That's why we invested so heavily in BI technologies across SQL Server. =We put a down
> payment many years ago, and now it's paying off in terms of revenue growt=h," Rizzo added,
> pointing to the company's release of OLAP (online analytical processing) =services in 1998,
> which was the first of a string of BI technologies integrated into the da=tabase itself.
> "People looked at us like we were kind of crazy," Rizzo said. "[They aske=d,] 'Why is
> Microsoft integrating BI into the database? Most people buy it separately=.' We're saying .
> integrate it seamlessly into the database. All the people who thought we =had four heads and
> eight eyes, you look at the strategies of our competitors, they're starti=ng to go down the
> same path we started down years ago."
http://www.fabalabs.org/resear=ADch/papers/FabalabsResearchPape=ADr-OSDBMS-=
.=2E.|||http://www.fabalabs.org/research/papers/FabalabsResearchPaper-OSDBMS-Eval.pdf