Month: August 2006

Posted in Oracle DBMS, RDBMS, Sybase

Oracle Market share

Posted on by rwjordan

One more point in the Sybase vs Oracle debate is the size of the Oracle installed base. The claim has been made that the reason Oracle is the number one RDBMS, is that the database has been selected for it’s features, reliability and maturity.

Once again this is a false premise as the real reason that Oracle is number one, is Marketing, plain and simple salesmanship. And not generally good salesmanship, but more like that of a pushy used car salesman. I had the occasion of witnessing this, more or less first hand.

At one company I work for they were going through the usually agony of having to upgrade a project costing system. The current one, home made, was failing. The replacement was between Oracle Financial’s and some modules or Deltec Costpoint. The evaluation team went through extensive testing of the features, and the Oracle system came up short, but with Oracle promises to add the missing features. The Costpoint system was nearly a perfect fit. And hence the choice to purchase Costpoint. This set off the first of three Oracle incidents. Oracle having lost the bid, did not take it lightly. They when directly to the CEO of the company and claimed that the evaluation team had made a costly and catastrophic choice for the company which would lead to serious business loss.

The CEO having more or less picked the evaluation team, was not impressed with the Oracle arguments. But this does not complete the story. This same team, was required to also make a choice of RDBMS’s Oracle, or Sybase. And as you might have guested the same Oracle sales reps were involved. The evaluation team after considerable testing Chose Sybase. And guess what? The Oracle reps again approached the CEO claiming that the evaluation team had failed their duties and were taking the company to the brink with their choice of Sybase. And again they were shown the door by the CEO.

This does not close the door. The company operated the Costpoint system on Sybase for many years with absolutely no issues. Until Deltec was, under pressure from Oracle, was forced to migrate to “Oracle only” RDBMS support and as such required all clients to switch to Oracle as part of a Costpoint upgrade. The company was forced to upgrade all the hardware necessary to operate the costpoint system in order to manage the Oracle installation.

Clearly Oracle did not ‘win’ this on features, just pushy sales reps.

And this is not the only example of Oracle strong arm marketing , like the comedian, “I’ve got a million of ’em”!

Posted in Oracle DBMS, RDBMS, SQL, Sybase

Row level Locking

Posted on by rwjordan

In the Sybase vs Oracle discussion there is always one issue that Oracle used to win. Row level locking. In the early days of Sybase, page level locking was the lowest level of granularity that locks attained. Much of this was due to a conscious choice of increasing the performance of the transaction, rather than ensuring unique row locking in Sybase. After row level locking was added to Sybase at version 11, this was proved to be a false ‘feature’ as most Sybase installations rarely implemented it.

In retrospect most issues relating to row level being a requirement can be traced back to badly implemented transaction clients. which makes this even more evident, is that in many cases, when the client transaction were ‘repaired’ to implement true ACID transactions, the Oracle databases performed better, and the row level locking issues vanished as a requirement.

UPDATE:

One other difference between Oracle and Sybase which doesn’t get much visibility is the business of isolation levels. Oracle allows the ‘dirty’ read and Sybase does not. This is changeable in both databases, but Oracle used this to their advantage in the locking wars as shared, and shared intent locking did not cause the same kind of issues like the ones you would encounter in Sybase.

Posted in IT Issues, Oracle DBMS, Personal, Solaris, SQL, Sybase

Sybase vs Oracle

Posted on by rwjordan

I’ve seen some discussion around the internet about the age old argument about which is best Sybase or Oracle. I have been reading Mr. Talebzedah article on Sybase vs. Oracle: 10 reasons to use Sybase on Linux and I would agree with many of his statements. Having installed and used both over the years, I would pick Sybase. Why more companies don’t use Sybase more, has always been a mystery to me. Sybase is cheaper to install, and operate both in hardware resource usage, and manpower utilization. As an example, which can be repeated ad finite, one of the companies I worked at required 20 DBA’s to support a single Oracle Financials system in version 7 Oracle. And they were terrified to upgrade to Oracle 8 as Oracle does not supply a migration path. Sybase in this same company was used extensively in 7/24 environments, and only had 18 DBA’s supporting more than 800 Sybase databases, with more than 15,000 logins. In Mr Talebzedah article he mentions 2.5 Oracle DBA’s to one Sybase DBA, and since you and I know that 0.5 DBA’s don’t really exist (see mythical man month) I would put that, rounding factors aside, to 3+ Oracle DBA’s to one Sybase DBA.

Oracle supporters always mention the ‘sophistication’ and maturity of Oracle features, and in the same breath include the requirements for learning more, and of it’s complexity. This complexity extends to it’s high requirements in installation, and operating Oracle databases. Ask an Oracle DBA why they have to maintain backup configuration files three or more times to feel safe? As an example of this heavy requirement for installation, Oracle makes more money consulting on how to install it, than selling the actual RDBMS product. As another cost Oracle DBA’s are higher paid than Sybase DBA’s you do have to pay for all this sophisticated knowledge. That’s not a fault of the DBA, but is is still a business expense, and adds to the TCO.

As for the maturity and sophistication, Oracle may win here, but I am not comparing ASE 15 as I have not used this, but in almost every environment I’ve ever worked in, this sophistication is never utilized. This is not a lack of programming skills in the staff. It has to do with not being locked into any particular RDBMS feature. Many companies are completely heterogeneous with regards to Databases, probably due to corporate merger mania. And database transportability is prized much more than any particular database feature. In some cases junior programmers utilize databases more as file systems than RDBMS systems and hence, gain nothing from the mature, sophisticated features Oracle might provide.

Ultimately Oracle grants nothing in the benefits column when the costs are taken into perspective. Oracle is more expensive, fragile and harder to develop applications for. Sybase is cheaper faster, more stable, and requires less hardware and manpower to operate.

Posted in Economy & Business, IT Issues, Personal

IT Downturn in the offing

Posted on by rwjordan

Between the economy starting to tank, and terrorist threats, I’m guessing that the IT hiring and equipment purchasing will take a large hit. From talking with folks in the U.S. it seems like most people are holding their money close to their wallets, indicating that most business spending will follow this trend. With everyone being afraid, capitol spending plans goes out the window.

Posted in IT Issues

Outsourcing IT?

Posted on by rwjordan

It’s amazing how many IT managers, let alone CFO’s CEO’s boards of directors believe that IT can be outsourced to save costs. From my experience this stems from a number of causes.

1) Management does not know what value IT provides as integral part of the business.

2) Management does not know what IT does.

3) Management does not know how much work IT does, or how.

4) Consultants, trying to sell something, have managed to convince management that outsourcing saves money. Either as a matter of personnel costs, or general operating costs.

This almost always results in reduced productivity in the IT department, staff churn and the loss of the best staff, a loss of, or a general lack of new documentation as to IT processes, software, development and maintenance.

And while addressing the issues, even the mere mention of outsourcing will result in degraded IT performance. And no amount of talk from management will result in a placation of the fear. Restoration of trust will be slow and painful, and in some cases will result in management looking further into outsourcing.

The problem lies in understanding, information and truth. IT will have to become involved in promoting their value to the business. Educating management as to the need for IT costs, and how they can promote to the bottom line of the business.

From the management perspective outsourcing looks good, document what IT does, and negotiate a cheaper deal to provide all the necessary services. The problem is as above, management does not know what IT does, or at least not everything, and as a matter of course they will omit the intrinsic value that loyal and innovative IT staff can, and do (unless demotivated by outsourcing rumors).

Consultants invariably manage to convince people that all IT processes and functions can be documented and mapped. This reason in fact, is the ‘why’ in why outsourcing does not reduce costs. Besides the costs that the consultant will charge for ‘complete documentation’ which isn’t complete. The outsourcing firm will contract for ‘complete documentation’ which does not provide complete services, or unsatisfactory ones, and then charge for additional ‘services’ not in the original contract, but should have been included in the consultants ‘complete documentation package’ and weren’t.

IT, and a dedicated staff provide more that simple ‘processes’ that can be documented or identified. The intrinsic value of good staff is never documented. This isn’t unusual as in most businesses HR has been substituted for people management skills. Staff are more or less just cogs, just wheels in a machine. The last thing a consultant will do is document staff qualities. You just can’t qualify, or replace good staff.

Posted in IT Issues, Personal

On IT Operations

Posted on by rwjordan

I had a friend and coworker define the nature of a properly working IT Operations department as, ‘Boring’ now to translate that, what he meant was that if Operations, systems and software were boring, then everything was working fine. It’s the natural state of affairs in an IT operations group.

If you find an IT department with their pants on fire, you know that things have hit the fan. Either the computer systems are broken, the security either physical or network has been compromised, or the software is buggy beyond comprehension. Exciting and thrilling, even career enhancing if you can fix and survive the fire and panic that happens in such environments.

So, in IT Operations, we strive to make life boring! Anything else is a disaster. 😉