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Sun Chief Calls Out IBM, Demands Compatibility
downbad writes "Sun's President, Jonathan Schwartz, yesterday published an Open Letter to the CEO of IBM, Sam Palmisano, in which he alluded to "behavior reminiscent of an IBM history many CIOs would like to forget" - a reference to Sun's frustration that IBM isn't supporting Solaris 10 with WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli, Rational and MQSeries products. In his "Dear Sam" letter - circulated via his blog - Schwartz refers first to the "long history of partnering" between Sun and IBM, and claims Sun customers have made repeated calls to IBM about having the choice to run IBM products on Solaris 10." *cough* Kettle, meet Pot.
Interesting that you should mention DTrace, because according to The Register it's getting open sourced under Sun's CDDL license. OSI approved the CDDL license a couple of weeks ago and it's basically a revamped version of the Mozilla Public License. If DTrace (or a reasonable facsimilie) can be made to work with Linux or other FOSS opererating systems then it's just a matter of time...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I've dealt with IBM Software in the past. They typically lag behind in their "official" supported platforms because they need to go through a lot of tests to validate their software works as designed. When I've run into issues like this they simply say "it may work, but we haven't tested it enough yet".
That is why they pick a flavor (or two) of Linux as supported instead of saying "we support Linux". Other distros will probably work, but they only have so much time to validate & test. For a long time WebSphere (at least on z/Series hardware) was only supported on a 2.2 kernel. It ran fine on 2.4, but it wasn't officially supported.
That being said, if you do have a problem and you have a support contract IBM will work with you to solve the issue, but they don't like to make gurantees about unsupported hardware / software interacting with their stuff.
> If people would use PostgresSQL, most companies' OLTP systems would be thrown, performance-wise, back
> into the stone ages. No matter how you cut it, DB2 (and some of the other commercial RDBMSs) are simply
> light years ahead of open source software.
Yeah, there are still many reasons to choose a commercial dbms. Like:
1. db2 just set the world record for transaction speed - at about 50,000 transactions a second. Last I heard mysql was trumpeting 800 transactions a second with innodb. Not sure about postgresql.
2. with partitioning, parallelism, and clustering, you can get subsecond response time from db2 *adhoc* queries against tables containing over a terrabyte of data. Postgresql, Mysql, and Firebird aren't even in the ballpark here. Note: mysql "speed" will end up requiring you to index every single column, which will kill your insert speed, double the size of the data, and their optimizer won't use the indexes anyway whenever you want to access more than 5% of the data.
3. Mature, proven high-availability solutions.
4. Mature, proven replication solutions.
5. Cost. Really - cost is a reason (sometimes) to use commercial software. Here's how this works: lets say you've got a critical business problem in which 1 minute of downtime = a loss of $10,000 dollars in revenue. Add to this a development team of 20 people ($1,000,000/year). Add hardware costs ($500,000). Now, that commercial database license may run you $50,000 (vs $500+ mysql, free for postgresql). But $50k is nothing compared to the costs at risk:
- online changes to db2 vs recycling mysql & postgresql
- robust ha on db2 vs replication for mysql
- standard sql functionality & productivity on db2 vs mysql
- less hardware for db2 than msyql/postgresql to get same performance
- etc, etc, etc
So, on a big project where the database is critical - you will actually *save* money going with a commercial database. Well, on large & critical applications anyway.
6. Consistency: since most organizations will require a commercial database for their most demanding applications - and they can benefit from a complexity reduction by using the same database on all applications. This way they've got just one set of skills to get all dbas on, they can get by with a smaller dba team (read: less labor = less cost), when a new version, patches, etc - they can get up to speed with it much faster, etc.
Not to say that the open source solutions aren't great: they are, and can pick up much of the database work these days. But there's still a huge case to be made for commercial products - and will be for a while, since the functionality missing in mysql & postgresql needed to compete at the top-end will be very difficult to implement.
It's more than just hypocrisy, it's a brass-balls dirty attack.
SUN CEO Scott McNealy on the Microsoft-Sun deal:
unprecedented work is being done to make all of Microsoft and Sun's software compatible. "Unfortunately, (our stuff) won't interoperate with IBM very well," he joked.
Yep, Sun CEO delcares a conspiracy with Microsoft to lock out IBM and then Sun turns around and accuses IBM of playing dirty on compatibility.
I tried submitting that link to Slashdot at the time. Oh well. I suggest reading the whole thing. I love how it practically says Microsoft wants Sun around as a pet competitor due to monopoly issues.
You'd think the people at Sun would have the brains to notice that being Microsoft's pet lapdog is an historically more dangerous and fatal position than being targeted for extermination as a Microsoft competitor.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.