Conference ulysse::rdb_vms_competition

580.0. "Article that gives Oracle poor marks on UNIX systems" by LACKEY::HIGGS (In Hans' and Kevin's excellent adventure) Thu Feb 22 1990 15:22

The March 1990 issue of DBMS magagzine (which usually concentrates on PC 
databases) has an article on relational databases on UNIX.  They cover Informix, 
INGRES, Sybase, ORACLE and 'the pack'.  It isn't terribly in-depth, but I 
thought their comments on ORACLE would be of interest.  The author is Richard
Finkelstein, 'a database technology consultant.  He is president of Performance
Computing Inc. of Chicago.'



Oracle

Oracle is the largest supplier of Unix RDBMSs, yet Oracle pales in comparison 
with the other Unix RDBMSs.  Whatever technical advantage Oracle once enjoyed
has vanished.  The latest release of Oracle 6.0 is missing features such as
stored procedures, triggers, BLOB data types, user defined data types and
functions, disk mirroring, clustered indexes, a multi-threaded database 
architecture, cost-based optimization for distributed and nondistributed queries,
and distributed updates.

In response to these deficiencies, Oracle has announced that Oracle 7.0 will
include many of these capabilities when it ships in mid-1990.  But given 
Oracle's track record, this projected release date must be viewed with some
skepticism.  Oracle version 6.0 was released two years late;  Oracle's PL/SQL
and SQL/FORMS 3.0 products have yet to ship.  They are both more than two years
late.  Oracle Server for PC LANs, recently released for OS/2, was also two years
late.

Version 6.0 does include row-level locking features that overcome a major
deficiency ofprevious Oracle versions that locked entire tables on updates.
Version 6.0 also includes asynchronous I/O capabilities and improved data
buffering.

Oracle is portable to many platforms, but this is only a slight advantage
because the other Unix RDBMSs also have excellent portability.  However, Oracle
does support Macintosh.  Among its competitors, only Sybase has a similar
capability.  Finally, Oracle has put much effort into expanding its product
and services and now it gets a major part of its revenue from selling add-on
products and consulting services.