roberts@cognos.UUCP (Robert Stanley) (03/21/90)
In an article dated 22 Jan 90 evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) wrote an article that began: => I can't choose between Sybase and Oracle, but I'd stay away from => Powerhouse. This was in reply to a question posed by d6maca@dtek.chalmers.se (Martin Carlberg) asking for advice on choosing between the three. Let me explain not only why you had difficulty getting answers to your questions but also the difference between the above three products. Firstly, Sybase and Oracle are both Relational Database Management Systems. The Cognos equivalent is a product called StarBase and not PowerHouse. PowerHouse itself, is an Application Development tool set that allows end users, like yourself, the ability to rapidly and effectively construct applications using whatever file system you happen to select. It provides a gateway into proprietary RDBMS such as Oracle but allows you basically, to choose which file systems, ISAM or direct files you need to do the job in question. Now YOU choose the solution to your design problem. Our attitude to UNIX, which you claim stinks, has manifest itself into a Corporate strategy that will see us supporting some eighteen products on as many as five vendors machines in the next calendar year. I have to admit, I'm at a loss which of our Sales Reps you spoke to that gave you these bizarre impressions, so let me straighten out the story. We support PowerHouse on MS-DOS, OS/2 PC's, HP's mid-range MPE, XL and UX machines, Digital's VAX/VMS and Data General AOS/VS and AViiON (due Fall '90). StarBase is supported on many, but not all of the above. Corporate moves this calendar year will see the release on IBM platforms at the request of IBM themselves. Most of our hardware vendors (and some others) use PowerHouse as their development tool of choice in their MIS and administrative areas and, yes, we're Canadian and proud of it. Incidentally, we do not support any products on Mainframes. Our clients are key to our business. They direct our growth, they spec. our products, they conduct our final Acceptance Testing, they tell us we have the best support operation in the industry and they grow in numbers at a rate that is testament to the quality of our products. PowerHouse applications readily allow users to move from one vendors hardware to another with little difficulty and the StarBase product is totally transparent with seamless integration so I am still unclear why your ex- employer found this unacceptable. As for us being hostile, rude, stubborn and generally unfriendly, I would like to issue a blanket invitation to anyone to either telephone or drop in to the local offices. I can be reached in Ottawa at (613) 738-1338 x3766. Come and see for yourself. Sue Hardman Product Manager, UNIX products Cognos Incorporated ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Please note that Marketing at Cognos are currently not connected to Usenet, and this is being posted as a guest of an R&D account. -- Robert Stanley UUCP: uunet!mitel!sce!cognos!roberts | 3755 Riverside Drive Cognos, Inc. INET: roberts%cognos.uucp@uunet.uu.net | PO Box 9707 (Research) Voice: (613) 738-1338 x6115 | Ottawa, Ontario 45 21N 75 41W FAX: (613) 738-0002 | K1G 3Z4, Canada
nigelc@cognos.UUCP (Nigel Campbell) (04/04/90)
It is a shame that you grew to hate our products so much . In my
experience of users 'hating' the product (this covers 5+yrs with Cognos) in
Europe and North America I frequently found that two trends repeated
themselves
1. The designers/programmers/users never took a course .
2. The database/file designs were not normalised or denormalised
for i/o,locking conflicts etc .
I will give you a classic example of a user quoting what a pig the product
was
Benchmark : Read approx 3+ million records in 1 Vax/Rms file and perform
some summing of males,females etc etc
They screamed that Quiz was taking so long that they killed it after
12+ cpu hours!!!! A Cobol program however only took 9 Cpu hours . The user
said it would be 'nice' to run the program at least once a day ... good luck
if it took 9 hours on an empty Vax . Cognos Support and Development were
asked what was up and what to do . The final answer which made both Quiz and
Cobol look good was simple , summarise the data in an appropriate form and
dynamically update the sums from the data entry screens . Net result was
the reports ran under 20 miuntes elapsed (never heard what the cpu time was).
Digital Review looked at Powerhouse early last year I think and
compared it against other dec-tools ...... we came out quite favorably !!