daveb@comspec.uucp (dave berman) (07/15/90)
Is anyone actually using one of Britton Lee's SQL Servers? They call it SHARE BASE, and it is handled in Canada by Compushare Database Systems Inc, (President David J Killins). It was designed, in part, by Dr Bob Taylor, who is now the Executive Vice President of R&D for Britton Lee. I want to hear both good news and bad news. Everything I have seen about this suggests that it may be a dream come true, but I am looking for some live users, not salespeople (at least, not only sales people). I understand this is the Superman of serving systems, and they consider themselves in competition with the more well known servers, such as Oracle. ByTheWay, I wouldn't mind hearing bad and good about the other brands as well. If any of you know how much it actually cost you to set it up, including cost of required hardware, and costs of mandatory service for the 1st year, that would me nice as well. If I get enough response to put together a summary, I will do so, and post is as a finished researched work. Thanks for everythng, -dave -- Dave Berman 436 Perth Av #U-907 daveb@comspec.UUCP Computer at work Toronto Ontario uunet!mnetor!becker!comspec!daveb Canada M6P 3Y7 416-785-3668 Fax at work
mao@eden (Mike Olson) (07/18/90)
In <1990Jul15.052332.18910@comspec.uucp>, daveb@comspec.uucp (dave berman) writes: > Is anyone actually using one of Britton Lee's SQL Servers? > > They call it SHARE BASE, and it is handled in Canada by Compushare Database > Systems Inc, (President David J Killins). It was designed, in part, by Dr Bob > Taylor, who is now the Executive Vice President of R&D for Britton Lee. i used to work for the company, and can answer some of your questions. my past association necessarily colors the review, but i believe that my technical assessments here are pretty much on target. first, a little history: britton lee changed its name to sharebase a couple of years ago, and was recently acquired, lock, stock, and barrel, by teradata corporation of los angeles (or thereabouts). teradata is the other major player in the database machine market. sharebase is now "a division of teradata corp.", but has pretty much the same middle management and technical staff as it did before the merger. bob taylor is no longer with the company. he left some time ago, and is now at hewlitt packard. i don't want to publish the names of sharebase customers that i know about, but i can tell you that organizations both inside and outside the government with some pretty serious database problems have been using their machines and software for years. you may be able to convince your salesperson to give you a list of references before you buy. of course, the list you get will be satisfied customers, so you won't get an unbiased view, but that may put you into touch with others. i was a techie at sharebase. for what it's worth, i believe that the company has an outstanding product. their servers are fast. they were the first company (and i believe are still the *only* company) to have their sql implementation certified by ansi as compliant with the sql '89 standard. there's a wide range of software that uses the server available; user code can run on VMS, CMS, scads of unix boxes, and pc's, among others. the short version is that i think sharebase is a good answer. you can contact me directly if you have specific questions or comments, or, of course, you can post. alternatively, mike tossy, who occasionally posts here, is a good source. although he works for the company, he usually tells the truth about technical issues. final disclaimer: i now work at uc berkeley on the postgres database project, and am no longer associated with sharebase. any misrepresentations in this article are unintentional, and are certainly not the fault of teradata corp. mike olson postgres research group uc berkeley mao@postgres.berkeley.edu
john@newave.UUCP (John A. Weeks III) (07/20/90)
In article <1990Jul15.052332.18910@comspec.uucp> daveb@comspec.uucp (dave berman) writes: > Is anyone actually using one of Britton Lee's SQL Servers? Many Britton Lee machines sold are to Metaphor DIS customers who use them for departamental databases, mostly in the Consumer Package Industry (all fortune 200 type companies). I have worked as a contractor for a company that does consulting for Metaphor DIS customers. I have seen numerous BLI installations. > I want to hear both good news and bad news. Everything I have seen about this > suggests that it may be a dream come true, but I am looking for some live > users, not salespeople (at least, not only sales people). Perhaps too good to be true! Britton Lee machines seem to produce accurate results, but the hardware and the interfaces leave much to be desired. One site that has 2 #200 and 2 #250 servers experiences hourly server resets. This affects productivity quite a bit because it requires babysitting the equipment and holding the users hands when they have problems. The interface is wierd because the Britton Lee uses its own internal query language, and SQL is a shell implemented over the internal language. There are some things that do not translate well. The result is that small changes in SQL syntax or a slightly different approach to a problem results in large unexpected changes in the runtime. Also, everyone that I have talked with that runs a BLI machine seems to agree that the tape drives are junk. Although I do not know firsthand, the model 260 machines do not have the reset problems of the earlier models, and the #280's are much better machines all around. On the plus side, BLI machines seem to be faster than Teredata machines when doing very small queries and when working with very small databases. BLI machines allow creating of scratch tables and do so very fast, where as creating temporary scratch tables on Teredata or DB2 is a very slow process. This might affect your programming style. > They call it SHARE BASE, and it is handled in Canada by Compushare Database > Systems Inc, (President David J Killins). It was designed, in part, by Dr Bob > Taylor, who is now the Executive Vice President of R&D for Britton Lee. The major problem with Britton Lee is Mr. Britton Lee...according to people that I know that used to work for him. Mr Lee is very smart, but he sometimes insists on doing things the wrong way. The fact that Britton Lee attempted to create a new database language standard (even though SQL is fast catching on in the corporate database area) ended up setting Britton Lee back quite a bit. -john- -- =============================================================================== John A. Weeks III (612) 942-6969 john@newave.mn.org NeWave Communications ...uunet!rosevax!bungia!wd0gol!newave!john ===============================================================================
davidm@uunet.UU.NET (David S. Masterson) (07/23/90)
In article <463@newave.UUCP> john@newave.UUCP (John A. Weeks III) writes:
The major problem with Britton Lee is Mr. Britton Lee...according to people
that I know that used to work for him. Mr Lee is very smart, but he
sometimes insists on doing things the wrong way. The fact that Britton Lee
attempted to create a new database language standard (even though SQL is
fast catching on in the corporate database area) ended up setting Britton
Lee back quite a bit.
Up until this point, I pretty much agreed with your article. Its been awhile
since I worked with Britton-Lee machines, so I can't really say one way or the
other how well they are doing in their current incarnation. The early
machines, though, were often rather touchy.
There never was a Mr. Britton Lee. The original chiefs of Britton-Lee (I
think their titles were Chairman and President) were Mr. David Britton and Mr.
Richard Lee. I met both of them early on in the development and marketting of
the Britton-Lee 500s (my group was an early customer). They left Britton-Lee
about 3 or 4 years ago while the company was going through some hard times.
They were felt to be good at leading a startup company, but had trouble
pushing it over into a growing company.
Actually, I believe the chief architect of the BL-500s was the same person who
designed much of the Sybase architecture and is the Executive Vice President
of Sybase (Dr. Bob Epstein). Before Britton-Lee, Dr. Epstein was a major
player in the development of University Ingres. He left Britton-Lee because
he came to feel that a startup company could not compete with big hardware
vendors in turning out specialized database hardware that would compete with
general hardware with good database software for very long (and I agree with
this). So, Britton-Lee had some good talent in development early on.
As to language standards, the Britton-Lee internal language is a derivative of
the Quel language that Ingres used. Also, the first BL systems came out
before there was an "SQL standard" and when there was still hope that the
standard would be the better Quel derivative. That the world went to SQL did
hurt Britton-Lee (and, I think, RTI, but they recovered better), though.
--
===================================================================
David Masterson Consilium, Inc.
uunet!cimshop!davidm Mt. View, CA 94043
===================================================================
"If someone thinks they know what I said, then I didn't say it!"miket@blia.BLI.COM (Mike Tossy) (07/24/90)
Just a few factual corrections: In article <463@newave.UUCP>, john@newave.UUCP (John A. Weeks III) writes: > > Many Britton Lee machines sold are to Metaphor DIS customers who use them > for departamental databases, mostly in the Consumer Package Industry (all > fortune 200 type companies). > Re: the name. Britton Lee became ShareBase, which just merged with Teradata. Re: The Metaphor/ShareBase (aka 'Britton Lee') association. The OEM relationship terminated when Metaphor signed a $10M development pact with IBM and started recommending DB2. (Not that I'm implying a relationship between those two events... :-) ) The OEM relationship covered only our very first line of products (which is now obsolete) and never included either of the current product lines. > One site that has 2 #200 and 2 #250 servers experiences hourly server resets. These are NOT ShareBase products. These are Metaphor products which include some OEM components provided by ShareBase. > The interface is wierd because the Britton Lee uses its own internal > query language, and SQL is a shell implemented over the internal language. > There are some things that do not translate well. The result is that small > changes in SQL syntax or a slightly different approach to a problem results > in large unexpected changes in the runtime. Our first product line used the QUEL langauge, and Metaphor choose to provide a shell to translate SQL to the QUEL internal langauge. > Also, everyone that I have talked with that runs a BLI machine seems to > agree that the tape drives are junk. ShareBase did not provide the tape drives on these machines. Metaphor OEMed tape drives from a different vendor than ShareBase. > The major problem with Britton Lee is Mr. Britton Lee...according to people > that I know that used to work for him. Mr Lee is very smart, but he > sometimes insists on doing things the wrong way. ... As David Masterson (uunet!cimshop!davidm) pointed out there is no 'Mr. Britton Lee'. His speculation that you mean Dr. Bob Epstein, now of Sybase, seems plausible. > ... The fact that Britton Lee > attempted to create a new database language standard (even though SQL is > fast catching on in the corporate database area) ended up setting Britton > Lee back quite a bit. The decision to use QUEL rather than SQL was made in 1978 and clearly, given 12 years of hindsight, a mistake. We have made considerable effort to undo that damage by being the FIRST (AND SO FAR ONLY) vendor to pass the U.S. Federal Government's ANSI Standard SQL validation test suite. ADVERTISEMENT: Ask your vendor if they can pass the ANSI SQL Standard validation suite. Ask for a copy of the validation report! -- Teradata Corporation Mike Tossy ShareBase miket@blia.bli.com 14600 Wichester Blvd (408) 378-7575 ext2200 Los Gatos, CA 95030 (Formerly: Britton Lee, Inc.) These are only my opinions.