Re: SQL server Vs Oracle

David W. Fenton (dXXXfenton_at_bway.net) wrote:
: [Followups restored because I'll be responding to the non-inflammatory part
: of the post]

It really doesn't have anything to do with comp.databases.* does it? The only DBMS mentioned was _my_ comment about memory in a SQL server!

However, to the details.

: Any company that was buying DX4-100s with 500MBs of disk space in early 1996
: was being extraordinarily foolish with their money. They should have been

We had a very good deal at the time, and was only running Windows 3.1. These machines were an upgrade from 8Mb 386's with 100mb disk and a 16Mb DX4-100 with 500Mb sounded like mega-power. We could get three of these for the same cost as a P133 at the time. Heck, our "power servers" were being installed with P133's in them!

Remember there are two important _additional_ factors that businesses have to worry about:

1. scale! Upgrading 500 machines is VERY man-time intensive, and very disruptive to the company.
2. standardisation! With 500 machines close to being the same, the cost-of- ownership of each machine drops because "quirks", faults, problems etc all become standardised. You don't want an ad-hoc mixture of DELLs, Compaq's, IBM's, dodgy-clone etc, and getting different models from each company. It makes support (both software and hardware) a lot harder. Until you've been there and done this you just don't appreciate how uninformed most of the users are compared to us, and how much easier standardisation is, and how well it helps your helpdesk to diagnose and fix problems at first-line support level.

Both of these issues have been skipped over by your discussion, yet they are both vitaly important to any medium->large company.

: If you do have 1GB machines attached to a network and you don't have 100MBs
: of disk space free, those machines need to be cleaned up. There should be

See point 1 above and now apply that to "free thinking" users - eg editorial staff (magazine publishing company). These users are unmanageable in that sense.

: Businesses cannot afford *not* to spend wisely. The machine with the lowest
: acquisition cost is often the most expensive in the long run. One should
: always buy workstations that will last 3 years without upgrades, or buy

See point 1 above. These machines _have_ lasted three years, and now we are getting round to the next round of upgrades (64Mb PII-350, 6Gb) but see point 1. This time we are planning a 2 year cycle...

: wise and pound-foolish. Over a 3-year lifespan, a $2,000 business PC costs
: $2.67 a day. A $1,200 PC, discarded after two years, costs about $2.40 a day.

Nope, dispute those figures on principle. More importantly is point 2 above.

: Anyone who rolled out Win95 with Office95 two years ago, when there was
: already a new release of Office, was very foolish. It's important to time

Win95 was an upgrade to Win3.1 at the time, and we were still at Office 4.3. Indeed, it's _only_ this rollout that we've officially gone from support 4.3 to support for 97. We never officially rolled out Office 95 because of point 1 above. NB: Office97 was very buggy at that time and was considered unstable.

: I've been advising clients for two years to evaluate NT as their next
: client workstation OS. This includes people who were still on Win3.x

Our rollout is NT4 - we're taking advantage of the new machine rollout to do various apps upgrades at the same time.

: not Office97. Dell is already shipping with Office2K pre-installed.

Not on our Dells it's not!

: An upgrade of a 32MB client workstations to 96MBs could get you another

See point 1 above.

--

rgds
Stephen Received on Tue May 18 1999 - 04:14:40 CDT