• Home
• Reviews
• News
• Downloads
• CNET TV

About me

My posting summary

1 to 1 of 1

My comments

• When you have the Program Director of DB2 adding more misinformation to Livesey comments, you just have to wonder how difficult was it for IBM to recruit qualified Program Directors for their software products. Mr Leon's statement about open and Intellectual Property concerns dovetail with those of Microsoft. I bet the Microsoft folks are ROTFL.
  
  Unfortunately, the light version is DB2-Express C (free edition) which does not have fixpacks and cannot be updated with fixpacks. This version is only good for stand alone developers. In essence, a buggy compiled version of the DB2 product which IBM tries to push out there as a "free" version. Nice try IBM. I cannot see corporate or software engineering firms wasting their staff time with a buggy edition of a product to which fixpacks cannot be applied. (I'm sure they exist).
  
  Sure its a "full function product" but if you need to apply fixpacks you need to buy support , which is not trivial and IBM's done a lot of quick talking about this one. IBM's strategy is to use a lot of wording throwing in the "Free" but carefully omitting the paid subscription support phrases.
  
  And the DB2 Express-C "Paid" version counts the number of processor cores (limit of 4 cores) and limit of total of 4 GB of memory. MySQL paid version does not limit memory or number of processor cores. So Mr Leon's statement about the equivalence or similarity of IBM's offering to MySQL's offering is inaccurate.
  
  In the open source arena, Sun + MySQL is giving IBM a run for its money. For those of us who remember the 90s when IBM was proclaiming that MVCC was of no merit or scale up versus scale out was the way to go. IBM has tried to implement a poor mans version of MVCC in DB2 9.5. Sun brings hardware, virtualization, and multiple OS support to the table, along with a hard learned mistakes learned in working with Open Source.
  
  For web based applications, I bet my money on Sun+MySQL. For inhouse workgroup and departmental applications, it is Microsoft SQL Server all the way, For inhouse enterprise applications, it is Oracle by far.
  
  DB2 for the most part is getting irrelevant, just like Websphere and Rational. There are pockets of adoption of DB2 and Websphere but nothing to hinge your career on.

  June 17, 2008

  1 reply