Edwards Ed wrote:

> Frank,
> I forgot to mention: "Also, I would not throw DB2 at our small databases (the cost doesn't justify it)"!
> ________________________________
>
> From: Edwards Ed [mailto:db2udbdba-ezmlmshield-x46309679.[Email address protected]
>I forgot to mention one of your other statements: " SQL Server is a toy database". Now, now Frank!
>We have a large number of SQL Server 2000 databases (all of them are
less than 3 GB in size).
>SQL Server 2000, along with VB 6.0, .Net, Crystal Reports, Reporting
Services, Microsoft Access,
>Microsoft Excel and IIS 5.0 and 6.0 works great for these databases.
Most of our databases are
>accessed by 50 or less users at a time. I wouldn't throw Oracle 10G
at these databases (the cost
>doesn't justify it).
>
>And don't forget MySQL! It is gaining in popularity! Remember what they said about Linux?

A few thoughts here:

DB2 (and oracle) are priced very competitively for small databases with
small numbers of users. The price of db2 express is around $650. Which
puts it below the price of SQL Server, and about identical to MySQL
(which isn't free for most commercial use). If you've got more users,
but it's still a small database then the price could be as high as $5k I
think. Which is still probably less than the cost of the hardware.

Even when db2 (or oracle) are more expensive than mysql or sql a shop
may use them for the smaller databases - in order to keep labor and tool
costs lower by avoiding a hetrogenous environment.

I also wouldn't call any database a 'toy database' - and I've run 120
gbyte SQL Server databases on 450 mhz SMPs. Meanwhile, MySQL and it's
superior open source competitor Postgresql can handle a terrabyte. But
without any parallelism or partitioning features MySQL and Postgresql
don't scale well - you could end up throwing $500k of hardware at MySQL
to try to get the speed that you could with $15k of hardware using DB2
or Oracle. SQL Server's new release is supposed to support a clustering
option similar to DB2's. However, the initial reports indicate that
it's pretty slow in comparison to db2 or oracle.

ken farmer

DB2 & UDB email list listserv db2-l LazyDBA home page