Re: database market share 2003

"Daniel Morgan" <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu> wrote in message news:1086927557.861975_at_yasure...
> And please let me asset to you that code I have written in my 35+ years,
> many of which were IBM DB2 on mainframes ... that code could not be
> moved, without modification, to a Windows or other platform. Even
> basic things like how many characters long is the name of a table
> would/could change.
>
> Is that no longer true?
>
> I find it hard to believe that anyone would assert that DB2 on OS/390
> where it is shared-everything can be put onto a different operating
> system where the DB2 architecture is shared-nothing and think it will
> run as is. Please tell me if I am incorrect.
>
> You see the one nice thing about some of DB2's competitors is that
> the code written is 100% compatible across operating systems ... not
> even requiring a recompilation.
>
> --
> Daniel Morgan

No, that is not true. The OS/390 (MVS or whatever) COBOL compiler you might have used with Oracle on OS/390 is not compatible with any Windows, Linux, or UNIX COBOL compiler (assuming you even wanted to use COBOL on those platforms).

Initially, there were many incompatibilities between DB2 on OS/2 (the predecessor of DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows). Those differences at the DML level are very few now (especially with the release of DB2 version 8 for z/OS).

The reason that Oracle uses the same code base for all platforms has nothing to do with portability, it has to do getting a product out the door with a few changes as possible to work on a particular OS. The fact that Oracle on does not work very well on OS/390 is a testament to the fact that such a strategy is mostly a marketing one, and did not produce excellent products that customers want (at least not on OS/390).

The portability issue is mostly a red herring. Microsoft SQL Server is selling quite well even though it only runs on Windows. On the platforms that DB2 competes vigorously with Oracle (Linux, UNIX, and Windows) the DB2 code base is identical on all those platforms. Received on Thu Jun 10 2004 - 23:43:35 CDT