noren@dinl.uucp (Charles Noren) (01/04/89)
In December I asked the question:
We need a lean fast relational database management system that runs on
a Sun 3 with SunOS 4.X. It would be helpful if it were easy to learn
since none of us on the project have used databases much. What databases
should I consider, which ones should I stay away from?
There was considerable interest, so I am posting what I have received to
date. So far there has not been much response with concrete info, but I
asked at a bad time with Christmas approaching. I will continue to accept
information and will again post a summary.
o General Comments:
Paul Turner commented:
"...As far as helping you out, it really depends
on what you are going to do. All of the top vendors are pretty close (
they just keep leap frogging one another). In fact, if anyone claims
that their DBMS is leaps and bounds better than the rest, be suspicious!
If can tell me a little more on what you're doing, I may be of some help."
o Ingres
I had several responses that mentioned Ingres. Tom Mack of AT&T Bell
Laboratories is in a group that uses Ingres on a mainframe and they are
very happy with it. They are considering moving their application to a
Sun [3 or 4] or a 3b2/600.
I had an anti-recommendation of Ingres from an employee of Oracle
who has used both Oracle and Ingres (see below).
In buying Ingres for the Sun, I have been told both by Sun and Ingres
that it is best to buy Ingres from Ingres itself. You get better
support direct from Ingres than Sun and Ingres will have that latest
version available.
o Oracle
An employee of Oracle wrote:
"I suggest ORACLE. Obviously, since I work for the company, my suggestions
are suspect :-). I will point out that support is superb (I call the same
support line that customers use, and they're really wonderful compared to
some of the vendors I deal with).
"I will also add an anti-recommendation for INGRES. I had to use it in my
previous job (version 5.0), and it was horribly buggy. Ick.
"I'm a Unix sysadmin, and not a developer..."
o Sybase
I got some sales material from Sybase on their database system.
One thing that caught my eye was that Sybase supports Division B Level
security. I am certainly not qualified to comment on the merits of
Sybase. I have heard from several people at different companies
over the past year that said they liked Sybase. I did not get specifics
as to why they did like it.
o Informix
The only information I have on this system is that someone in our
company could not Suntool's DBXTOOL source line debugger on code
that called Informix utilities. This was done with SunOS 3.x.
I do not know if this problem is corrected with SunOS 4.x.
o ShareBase (Britton Lee)
Britton Lee, Inc. sent information on their product, ShareBase.
ShareBase consists of a dedicated database server that off-loads
the database operations. They also provided contacts in our
company that have used this product (I have yet to contact these
people).
Thanks for all the responses (past and future).
--
Chuck Noren
NET: ncar!dinl!noren
US-MAIL: Martin Marietta I&CS, MS XL8058, P.O. Box 1260,
Denver, CO 80201-1260
Phone: (303) 971-7930pavlov@hscfvax.harvard.edu (G.Pavlov) (01/05/89)
In article <820@dinl.mmc.UUCP>, noren@dinl.uucp (Charles Noren) writes: > An employee of Oracle wrote: > "I suggest ORACLE. Obviously, since I work for the company, my suggestions > are suspect :-). I will point out that support is superb (I call the same > support line that customers use, and they're really wonderful compared to > some of the vendors I deal with). > > "I will also add an anti-recommendation for INGRES. I had to use it in my > previous job (version 5.0), and it was horribly buggy. Ick. > Funny, when we evaluated dbms's on a machine, our experiences were exactly the opposite. On both counts. At that time, they dragged out a former RTI employee to give us the grubby "low down" on Ingres as well. We haven't seen any of it on the platforms we've run on (HP 9000, VAX VMS & Ultrix, SUN, MIPS, and IBM clone PC's). Not to say that Oracle is worthless or doesn't work fine on some subset (maybe the overwhelming majority) of the machines its been ported to. But the only thing it has over anyone else is marketing. Glossy, as in the trade rags, or shoddy, as in the above. greg pavlov, fstrf, amherst, ny