Re: DB2 UDB or Oracle (who has better support)

DA Morgan wrote:
> Lets get real here. If I walk into a customer site and find the
> "address" field in the person table is VARCHAR2(30) and the "address"
> field in the customer table is VARCHAR2(35) I raise an alarm with
> managment. The fine folks at IBM didn't even rise to that level of
> consistency. And while the product has many strenghts this is one of
> its major weaknesses. And one that not only could have been easily
> avoided but one that shouldn't have been committed by anyone with more
> than one year of experience in an IT curriculum.
The sizes for DB2 identifier names used to be 8 and 18 for length for all object names and they were in synch. DB2 for LUW copied the spec. :-) What you are seeing is an extension of the limits. For most objects the direction is 128. Execution of that depends on product schedules and business requirements. DB2 for LUW's pressure to increase lengths is higher than that of DB2 for zOS because it is the more common migration target from other DBMS. I would be surprised if Mark T. has no change requests on his desk as well given that Oracle uses, AFAIK, 30. (and there were debates in this group on that topic here not too long ago). It's some sort of length inflation. What used to be good enough 20 years ago is not anymore and once one product starts to case the rest fall like dominos.

Increasing limits is easy.. Changing semantics is hard.

Cheers
Serge

-- 
Serge Rielau
DB2 SQL Compiler Development
IBM Toronto Lab