> 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.

> "DA Morgan" <damor***@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" <damor***@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.

>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...
>

> 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.
>
Larry

>
> "rkusenet" <usenet***@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.

> DA Morgan <damor***@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.

>>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...

> 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.

>> 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.

> DA Morgan <damor***@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.

> Paul <paulsnewsgro***@hotmail.com> writes:
> > DA Morgan <damor***@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/>

>
>
>
>
> Chris Browne wrote:
>
>>Paul <paulsnewsgro***@hotmail.com> writes:
>>
>>>DA Morgan <damor***@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.

> 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

"Jurgen Haan" <jur***@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).

"Paul" <paulsnewsgro***@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:68bu91d149m6oc9gsdrl07h363ies7muhn@4ax.com...
>
>
> "Neil Truby" <neil.tr***@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?

>
> 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?

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?

>
> 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?
>

> "Neil Truby" <neil.tr***@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?

> "Jurgen Haan" <jur***@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.
>
>

> 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."