This along with their new giveaway pricing scheme of windows CE is the greatest accomplishment of linux. Linux prevents MS from charging monopoly prices and everybody benefits when that happens. I hope Linux makes more headways into the desktop and staroffice gain a little market share too. It would mean lower prices for windows and office which would greatly benefit the average person or company.
On the other hand it does undercut the "free things are crappy things" argument MS uses. Next time Ballmer or Allchin makes a comment like that somebody ought to remind them of this.
Every time I complain about my W2K crashing some windows fan on slashdot says "you shouldn't have bought a dell you fuck" And then they get moderated up to 5 because any pro microsoft post gets moderated up (like yours).
OK this is just my take on the situation so do your own research OK?
There is no significant difference between the "commercial" version and the open source version. In fact it's more accurate to say that there is no commercial version at all. There is a fork between the Borland version called Interbase and the "community" version called firebird. This is due to the fact that Borland owns the trademark "Interbase" and the open source folks did not want to run afoul of any laws.
Right now Borland is developing the interbase fork and firebird people are develpoing theirs. I would trust the firebird fork better myself as Borland got rid of most of their interbase staff. The most experienced of the borland staffers went on to form the ibphoenix company which provides certified builds and support.
If I was just fooling around I would go download the firebird suite;) and some related tools and start playing. You'll find the documents are excellant and the third party tools are awsome. If I was running a business on it I'd call the ibphoenix people up first. If I couln't come to an agreement with them then I'd call Borland. Some big companies may only want to deal with Borland though so it might be an easier sell to your boss.
" I'm assuming that the statement "none of these databases can comete with Oracle head to head" applies to the open-source databases. I'd be most happy to put DB2 up against Oracle (and Oracle up against a wall.;-)"
Yes I should have clarified that. DB/2 can scale from your laptop to your mainframe. It's very nice.
It's a comples question with complex answers.
In the end you have to decide weather or not you need to scale up and when.
Of thhe free databases three that are closest to doing what oracle does are interbase, postgres and sybase 11.03 (not open source but free). Each one of these is suitable for a small to medium size company to start with. sybase is aging but still usable and postgres has a quirky set of features but keeps getting better at a very fast rate there are also a couple of companies prioviding support for it. Interbase has been around forever, is well tested and has a large userbase. It is supported by an exrtremely knowledgabel company called ibphoenix and borland too. It also runs equally well on windows or *nix and has great third party client side tools for administration.
The next tier up in price you have ms-sql, db/2, and informix, and sybase. MS-SQL is ok if you are willing to tie yourself to windows forever and are willing to pay extra for jdbc drivers and don't want to ever access from unix with php or perl or python (freetds is a valiant effort but it's still not 100% functional).
DB/2 is surprisingly affordable for the workgroup edition I was quoted about 6 grand for an unlimited user license. Compare this with the 5K per processor license for sql2000 and it's a bargain. Your mileage may vary depending on the size of your company and how afraid MS is of you switching. They offer deep discounts to large clients.
I have never used informix or sybase so maybe other people can talk about those but sybase does offer sqlanywhere studio which is a low cost alternative you can check out.
Mysql still has a way to go catch up with these databases so I would say forget about it for now.
In summary. The free databases do anywhere from 70-80% of what the big bucks databases do at about 70-80% of the speed. If you don't need that last 20% there is no need to spend the money.
Allthough none of these databases can compete with oracle head to head they would make great starting points for a company just starting out.
Of the open source databases Interbase is easiest to setup and use IMHO so it would get my final recommendation.
I don't have too much experience with Mysql but here are some problems I have run into with postgres.
1) Make sure the ODBC driver uses cursors. If not Access will attempt to pull all data from your tables for a simple select queries. This is especially true in forms bound to tables (a bad idea in the first place).
2) the default setup of access runs queries in a case insensitive matter. Make sure you turn on the case sensitive option. Do this even if you go with ms-sql it will make migration easier when you ditch it later.
3) Make sure every table has a primary key and the index name of that primary key sorts alpheitcally first. Name your primary keys AAAAAPkey_tablename or somthething.
4) put in a timestamp field in every table it helps access out.
5) Keep your table names relatively short. Access and SQL server let you have very long table names while Oracle, postgres, db/2 will limit it. If you want to upgrade your sql server later you will be glad you kept your table names short.
6) On a similar note don't put stange character in you field or table names. Don't name objects fax# or discount% also don't use a number as the first character of an object name. Access will let you but your dabase might not. Basically it's best to limit yourself to alphanumerics and maybe the underscore.
7) Make all your table names uppercase. This is not strict but it's a good idea. If not at least try to keep a good method for capitilization and stick with it.
8) Try not to depend too heavily on stored procedures. Although they can buy performance they make switching databases very hard.
There are a coule of reasons for this.
One the MS-SQL ODBC driver is cursor based. When you do a select * from sometable or open up a form based on a table sql server does not return the whole keyset it returns a cursor with a few hundred records and waits for further insturctions. Chances are that the mysql or oracle ODBC driver does not use cursors and attempts to return the whole recordset. Check your options and see if you can turn on a cursor based option.
Secondly yes access sometimes decides it wants to do the query itself instead of sending it to the server. Either turn you query into a passthrough or create a view.
If you take a creful look at those benchmarks you'll see that the machine was probably being overwhelmed byt the benchmark. They should have at least used a RAID 0 setup so that disk access was fast as possible. In my real world experience I would say that postgres was slower them both ms-sql server and oracle for most things. OTOH it does provide 80% of the functionality and speed of both at a much lower cost (same with interbase BTW). If you can live without that last 20% it's a good thing.
Ok ask yourself this question.
How much do I look like an Octopus? How much do I think like a bobcat? The answer my friend is nothing and not much. If two creatures who evolved on the same planet, same atmosphere look and act so different from each other why do you think aliens from another planet with a completely different atmosphere, gravity, flora and fauna would look and act excetly like humans?
I guess it's all water under the bridge. To this day Novell has superior products like NDS and ZENworks but still does not know how to sell them or market them.
Novell blew a bunch of opportunities. Most of this was because I think they were not evil enough. It never occured to them to make sure you could only connect to a novell server via dr-dos or simply bundle DR-DOS with every novell client install. If they had done this it would have been a huge boost to the market share of dr-dos and would have slowed down MS some.
Also I think they blew an opportunity when they did not make perfect office into a server app (which they had hinted at). If they made perfect office a NLM and ran it from the server it would have been a major player in the corporate market.
MS understood bundling and cramming unwanted software down their customers throats but Novell never went down that road. Maybe they were stupid maybe they were just too nice.
They really should have hyped the fact the novell was significantly faster then NT at file server but you never heard a peep about that.
"In my opinion, while a company does not have a right to an employee's thoughts and ideas, they do have a right to get honest answers and ethical behavior."
Oh man that's funny. Where do you come up with this stuff. An employer has no such rights unless the employee was dumb enough to sign away his own rights. The employer should expect the employee to show up on time and do what he is told and that's about it. Anybody who gives their emplyers anything else is just a shmuck.
Look at how the company he works for is going to make out. This guy worked on his own time for months creating a product, at the same time he was working for his employee. Now because his employee had better lawyers and made him sign something his employee gets the product for free. In effect his employee just made him work hundreds of hours without paying a dime of regular or overtime.
His best revenge at this point may be release the code under GPL. This way his company can not at least claim an exclusive lock on his code.
COmpanies are nto entitled to their clients. Anybody can "steal" a client at any time for any reason. If the company is unable to keep it's clients happy then they deserve to lose them and it really does not matter who they lose them to.
LOL. Just like the supreme court did with the election. They said something to the effect..
"We are using the equal access clause to justify this decision but only in this case. If you come to us with another equal protection case we reserve the right to ignore it alltogether.
You are absolutely right. Administering a windows 2000 machine is not easy or simple. Your average user is simply unable to cope with all the tricky things you need get your machine set up and working correctly.
For your average joe user or your mom or day windows 2000 is not a good choice because as you point out it requires a lot of expertise.
I would recommend the mac for most users and windows 2000 for power users or experts who can competently manage a complex operating system like windows 2000.
"But don't let me stand in the way of gratuitous microsoft bashing or anything."
There is nothing wrong with MS bashing. MS is not above critism it's just a fucking corporation not a god. You are lucky he did not do one of the following..
Call them Un-american.
Bribe I mean lobby politicians to make laws that would make coding windows illegal.
pay people to disrupt public forums.
pay people to say bad thing about them and good things about himself.
Lie under oath
Engage in evidence and witness tampering in a federal court.
The undisputable fact is that MS is one of the most unethical companies on the planet and should be bashed and critisized daily till they behave like responsible citizens.
Why should they be held to a different standard then Nike, Exxon, Firestone etc.
Slashdot Mirror
This along with their new giveaway pricing scheme of windows CE is the greatest accomplishment of linux. Linux prevents MS from charging monopoly prices and everybody benefits when that happens. I hope Linux makes more headways into the desktop and staroffice gain a little market share too. It would mean lower prices for windows and office which would greatly benefit the average person or company.
On the other hand it does undercut the "free things are crappy things" argument MS uses. Next time Ballmer or Allchin makes a comment like that somebody ought to remind them of this.
Every time I complain about my W2K crashing some windows fan on slashdot says "you shouldn't have bought a dell you fuck" And then they get moderated up to 5 because any pro microsoft post gets moderated up (like yours).
OK this is just my take on the situation so do your own research OK?
;) and some related tools and start playing. You'll find the documents are excellant and the third party tools are awsome. If I was running a business on it I'd call the ibphoenix people up first. If I couln't come to an agreement with them then I'd call Borland. Some big companies may only want to deal with Borland though so it might be an easier sell to your boss.
There is no significant difference between the "commercial" version and the open source version. In fact it's more accurate to say that there is no commercial version at all. There is a fork between the Borland version called Interbase and the "community" version called firebird. This is due to the fact that Borland owns the trademark "Interbase" and the open source folks did not want to run afoul of any laws.
Right now Borland is developing the interbase fork and firebird people are develpoing theirs. I would trust the firebird fork better myself as Borland got rid of most of their interbase staff. The most experienced of the borland staffers went on to form the ibphoenix company which provides certified builds and support.
If I was just fooling around I would go download the firebird suite
" I'm assuming that the statement "none of these databases can comete with Oracle head to head" applies to the open-source databases. I'd be most happy to put DB2 up against Oracle (and Oracle up against a wall. ;-)"
Yes I should have clarified that. DB/2 can scale from your laptop to your mainframe. It's very nice.
It's a comples question with complex answers.
In the end you have to decide weather or not you need to scale up and when.
Of thhe free databases three that are closest to doing what oracle does are interbase, postgres and sybase 11.03 (not open source but free). Each one of these is suitable for a small to medium size company to start with. sybase is aging but still usable and postgres has a quirky set of features but keeps getting better at a very fast rate there are also a couple of companies prioviding support for it. Interbase has been around forever, is well tested and has a large userbase. It is supported by an exrtremely knowledgabel company called ibphoenix and borland too. It also runs equally well on windows or *nix and has great third party client side tools for administration.
The next tier up in price you have ms-sql, db/2, and informix, and sybase. MS-SQL is ok if you are willing to tie yourself to windows forever and are willing to pay extra for jdbc drivers and don't want to ever access from unix with php or perl or python (freetds is a valiant effort but it's still not 100% functional).
DB/2 is surprisingly affordable for the workgroup edition I was quoted about 6 grand for an unlimited user license. Compare this with the 5K per processor license for sql2000 and it's a bargain. Your mileage may vary depending on the size of your company and how afraid MS is of you switching. They offer deep discounts to large clients.
I have never used informix or sybase so maybe other people can talk about those but sybase does offer sqlanywhere studio which is a low cost alternative you can check out.
Mysql still has a way to go catch up with these databases so I would say forget about it for now.
In summary. The free databases do anywhere from 70-80% of what the big bucks databases do at about 70-80% of the speed. If you don't need that last 20% there is no need to spend the money.
Allthough none of these databases can compete with oracle head to head they would make great starting points for a company just starting out.
Of the open source databases Interbase is easiest to setup and use IMHO so it would get my final recommendation.
I don't have too much experience with Mysql but here are some problems I have run into with postgres.
1) Make sure the ODBC driver uses cursors. If not Access will attempt to pull all data from your tables for a simple select queries. This is especially true in forms bound to tables (a bad idea in the first place).
2) the default setup of access runs queries in a case insensitive matter. Make sure you turn on the case sensitive option. Do this even if you go with ms-sql it will make migration easier when you ditch it later.
3) Make sure every table has a primary key and the index name of that primary key sorts alpheitcally first. Name your primary keys AAAAAPkey_tablename or somthething.
4) put in a timestamp field in every table it helps access out.
5) Keep your table names relatively short. Access and SQL server let you have very long table names while Oracle, postgres, db/2 will limit it. If you want to upgrade your sql server later you will be glad you kept your table names short.
6) On a similar note don't put stange character in you field or table names. Don't name objects fax# or discount% also don't use a number as the first character of an object name. Access will let you but your dabase might not. Basically it's best to limit yourself to alphanumerics and maybe the underscore.
7) Make all your table names uppercase. This is not strict but it's a good idea. If not at least try to keep a good method for capitilization and stick with it.
8) Try not to depend too heavily on stored procedures. Although they can buy performance they make switching databases very hard.
There are a coule of reasons for this.
One the MS-SQL ODBC driver is cursor based. When you do a select * from sometable or open up a form based on a table sql server does not return the whole keyset it returns a cursor with a few hundred records and waits for further insturctions. Chances are that the mysql or oracle ODBC driver does not use cursors and attempts to return the whole recordset. Check your options and see if you can turn on a cursor based option.
Secondly yes access sometimes decides it wants to do the query itself instead of sending it to the server. Either turn you query into a passthrough or create a view.
A great Idea. As a bonus it will have good compatibily with access.
If you take a creful look at those benchmarks you'll see that the machine was probably being overwhelmed byt the benchmark. They should have at least used a RAID 0 setup so that disk access was fast as possible. In my real world experience I would say that postgres was slower them both ms-sql server and oracle for most things. OTOH it does provide 80% of the functionality and speed of both at a much lower cost (same with interbase BTW). If you can live without that last 20% it's a good thing.
Ok ask yourself this question.
How much do I look like an Octopus? How much do I think like a bobcat? The answer my friend is nothing and not much. If two creatures who evolved on the same planet, same atmosphere look and act so different from each other why do you think aliens from another planet with a completely different atmosphere, gravity, flora and fauna would look and act excetly like humans?
I guess it's all water under the bridge. To this day Novell has superior products like NDS and ZENworks but still does not know how to sell them or market them.
I understand that IBM is still making a lot of money from OS/2. Last I checked their OS/2 profit was larger then RedHat Revenue!
Novell blew a bunch of opportunities. Most of this was because I think they were not evil enough. It never occured to them to make sure you could only connect to a novell server via dr-dos or simply bundle DR-DOS with every novell client install. If they had done this it would have been a huge boost to the market share of dr-dos and would have slowed down MS some.
Also I think they blew an opportunity when they did not make perfect office into a server app (which they had hinted at). If they made perfect office a NLM and ran it from the server it would have been a major player in the corporate market.
MS understood bundling and cramming unwanted software down their customers throats but Novell never went down that road. Maybe they were stupid maybe they were just too nice.
They really should have hyped the fact the novell was significantly faster then NT at file server but you never heard a peep about that.
Who the hell moderated this?
Note to moderators. Please try and read the post before moderating it up.
Amen to that.
"In my opinion, while a company does not have a right to an employee's thoughts and ideas, they do have a right to get honest answers and ethical behavior."
Oh man that's funny. Where do you come up with this stuff. An employer has no such rights unless the employee was dumb enough to sign away his own rights. The employer should expect the employee to show up on time and do what he is told and that's about it. Anybody who gives their emplyers anything else is just a shmuck.
Look at how the company he works for is going to make out. This guy worked on his own time for months creating a product, at the same time he was working for his employee. Now because his employee had better lawyers and made him sign something his employee gets the product for free. In effect his employee just made him work hundreds of hours without paying a dime of regular or overtime.
His best revenge at this point may be release the code under GPL. This way his company can not at least claim an exclusive lock on his code.
COmpanies are nto entitled to their clients. Anybody can "steal" a client at any time for any reason. If the company is unable to keep it's clients happy then they deserve to lose them and it really does not matter who they lose them to.
LOL. Just like the supreme court did with the election. They said something to the effect..
"We are using the equal access clause to justify this decision but only in this case. If you come to us with another equal protection case we reserve the right to ignore it alltogether.
"As noble Slashdotters, we're supposed to hate AOL, and love Napster, so what are we supposed to do in this case?"
Sorry I just can't get myself to love any corporation. To me all corporations are the same.
Works fine with .8 on W2k too.
The other 2 don't load (duh!) but don't crash it either.
Wow that really undermined arguments. You Mr Coward are just a fucking brilliant!
So tell me are all MS employees as smart and brave as you?
You are absolutely right. Administering a windows 2000 machine is not easy or simple. Your average user is simply unable to cope with all the tricky things you need get your machine set up and working correctly.
For your average joe user or your mom or day windows 2000 is not a good choice because as you point out it requires a lot of expertise.
I would recommend the mac for most users and windows 2000 for power users or experts who can competently manage a complex operating system like windows 2000.
"But don't let me stand in the way of gratuitous microsoft bashing or anything."
There is nothing wrong with MS bashing. MS is not above critism it's just a fucking corporation not a god. You are lucky he did not do one of the following..
Call them Un-american.
Bribe I mean lobby politicians to make laws that would make coding windows illegal.
pay people to disrupt public forums.
pay people to say bad thing about them and good things about himself.
Lie under oath
Engage in evidence and witness tampering in a federal court.
The undisputable fact is that MS is one of the most unethical companies on the planet and should be bashed and critisized daily till they behave like responsible citizens.
Why should they be held to a different standard then Nike, Exxon, Firestone etc.
I agree. If you have to rewrite your code anyways why depend on a verbose bloated thing like XML.
You can pass perl type hashes just as easily for example and save the parsing overhead and the extra tags that bloat the packet.