When Dinosaurs Fight: Oracle vs IBM
January 30, 2010
I enjoyed the Bistahieversor sealeyi fight between Oracle and IBM. The eWeek story “IBM Defends DB2 Against Ellison’s ‘Ignorant’ Remarks” is a delightful he-said, she-said. What made it even more delicioius for me is that both of the companies have aging products and are facing some tough competition from a certain outfit in Silicon Valley. When I read the article, I thought about two dinosaurs making big bird calls and scratching the earth. I want to highlihgt one exchange I though worthy of the Scott McNealy school of competitive sniping:
Ellison [Oracle]: “I can’t understand why IBM has never come out with a database machine. DB2 doesn’t cluster, doesn’t scale, nothing. You cannot run an OLTP [online transaction processing] application on DB2, because it doesn’t scale.”
Spang [IBM]: “Let’s talk about the TPC-C [Transaction Processing Performance Council] benchmark. Over the last seven years, DB2 has been in the leadership position about twice as long as Oracle. This game with benchmarks is a leapfrog game. Companies use the latest hardware, [the results improve] and it depends on point in time. What really matters is looking over a period of time for the consistency in the leadership position. So seven years, about twice as many days in the leadership position [over Oracle].
“I’ll give you another one close to a real-world situation: In the three-tiered SAP benchmark, DB2 [on Power systems] has held the record there for almost five years now, doing more than 50 million SAP steps per hour.
“Let’s talk about the SAP apps themselves. Just last year we announced that more than 100 companies had switched from Oracle to DB2 to power their SAP applications. The stories we hear are: better performance—in the range of 20 percent better—while reducing costs 30 to 40 percent. Coca-Cola Bottling was one that was quoted back then, talking about migrating from Sun servers to Power systems. It just made sense to them from a money point of view. “Larry also said something else: That the [recent] uncertainty about Sun systems was just a blip [due to the acquisition process]. Well, Coca-Cola pointed out that they have been switching from Sun to Power systems over a number of years. “I would argue that the uncertainty about Sun systems versus IBM accelerated a trend, and frankly, the uncertainty remains.
IBM and Oracle are more alike than different. Neither seems ready to acknowledge that an ecosystem change may send both big birds to the butcher.
Stephen E Arnold, January 30, 2010
A freebie. I will report this food related post to the Department of Agriculture.
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