March 21, 2003 at 11:03 am
Been reading through the SS2K v Oracle thread, which is still growing after months.
Today I'm in a DB2 presentation at work and was wondering if people know or what they think of DB2 as a platform v SS2K
Steve Jones
March 22, 2003 at 2:20 am
Must say I don't have much experience of DB2, but one thing I do know and like about it is that it is probably the closest to standards conformance of the big three (SQL Server, DB2 and Oracle).
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Chris Hedgate @ Apptus Technologies (http://www.apptus.se)
March 25, 2003 at 2:05 pm
Well I'll try and keep this breif. I am heavily involved in SQL Server and UDB on the FP (Fischer Price) platforms (just a joke the MainFramers tease us with), note I've been in this business longer than most of them. I think it's fun teasing back.
On the Mainframe, great product.
On FP, the Control Center GUI is a joke, I should cap it because it is a BIG joke. Slow, memory hog can't do half the things you need to.
How about something simple change the name of a field. Export, Drop, create, Import, oh don't forget the Grants. Oh you have to write the scripts to do all of this.
Hey try Alter View, one of my fav's, you CAN'T, but there IS an "Alter View" option !!!
Somewhere in the permissions area one screen you have to HOLD the shift key once you hilite a bunch of tables to grant too. If you let go they all are unselected. Funny the next screen where you actually select the rights for a user it works as expected.
Stored procedures, definitely an after thought by IBM, the GUI doesn't provide any way to grant rights to an SP once it's been compiled or bound. Yes you need a C compiler on the server.
Oh the name you grant doesn't match the name of the SP, it is the package name, and it changes when you recompile. Unless you get your developers to provide a specific name.
Oh Oh, restore the DB to a new server, don't forget to recompile, and reGrant all those packages.
Oh OH OH, I have to grant you the right to execute the SP, but it runs under the security context of the bounder (???), so if it use's User Temp tables (a problem I got burned on today) don't forget to grant it rights. Interestingly my bounder was SysAdm, roughly equal to SA.
Views, have View A include View B, recreate view B. View A is now invalid and must be reloaded.
Security, pretty limited. Particularly on NT. I support UDB on AIX also. In fact the Control Center passes my NT ID and a blank password to the server whenever I connect. Three tries and I'm locked OUT.
Restore a DB, an adventure unless it is to the same name and server it started from. The BU directory is about 6 levels deep. And the backups pile up forever unless you write scripts to cleanse them after n days.
Space management, SMS (System) vs. DMS. DMS is like setting SQL to NO growth. But SMS requires indeces in the same container as the table. If you look into the Dir where the DB exists you find hundreds of files. Each table, each index is a physical file on NT, I guess I should look at the AIX for that.
On-Line backups, not really until V8 and I haven't had a lot of success with them there yet.
Logs, functionaly fixed, although you can provide ?? alternates. Did a one field update to a 200 meg table, the first try crashed after 15 minutes, out of logs. Bumped logs way up and watched the logs grow to 490 meg, took 2 minutes.
No DSN less connections from VB (or C).
Version dependencies are frightening, FPs aren't always cumulative. To go from 7.1 to 7.2 FP 5 (actually all the same). Upgrade to 7.2, apply 7.1 FP3 and FP5 (Yes the 7.1 is NOT a typo). And client to server is VERY particular. The management is even worse, I need ver8 to manage a V8 DB, but I can't get to 7.2s unless they are at FP6 or greater. So basically upgrade them all at once (yea right). Yes 8 FPs for V7.1/7.2 to date.
Interestingly I don't think there ever was a 7.0 or 8.0 release.
Speed and performance, for the mid tier, DBs to say 500 gig. UDB is a Yugo (with a flat) racing a Viper. I wrote a DBMS nuetral test bed, simple design with RI, proper indeces etc. Same server, about 10 to 1 throughput.
Although after 30+ years in IT, mostly on IBM MFs, I shouldn't expect ease of use.
Yea you do get platform independence, I'm not sure if I'd call that a + or a -.
And despite what you are told, UDB doesn't move easily to the MF, if nothing else UDB is a release ahead.
And this was the Brief version.
KlK, MCSE
Edited by - kknudson on 03/25/2003 2:15:18 PM
KlK
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