What Now, Oracle?

[TonyT]

Chuck, I understand your point, however no matter how good your software is, if the hardware is a lemon, it will still fail. Most downtime encountered in I.T. is hardware related. That's why most management prefers a single vendor for hardware, OS, and DBMS like the AS400. If it fails blame it to IBM. In your situation, SUN for hardware and OS while ORACLE for DBMS. Remember all ORACLE DBMS software functionality is the same up to the access method/interrupt mechanism of the OS box it is installed.

[R.Daugherty]

I will just throw this in. The $170 million FBI case system that was just pitched because even the 10% of planned capability that actually got implemented "just refused to work", according to the FBI. Now that isn't just a little slow or not gee whiz enough, it just flat out didn't work. The current FBI system is a "3270 green screen" system that must be completely replaced because to do anything else is "putting lipstick on a pig". These are FBI quotes. The case system worked for decades as designed, and is clearly mainframe COBOL. The new system? Oracle 9i, clearly SQL, on Sun Unix. Now I know better than that is Sun hardware to blame. Sun runs stock exchanges. Sun and 370's and the AS/400 and other high end mainframes work. We know they do. So people will blame the design, $170 million dollars worth of design and development over five years, that totally and absolutely still refuses to even respond. It is entirely Oracle other than the Sun hardwars. Oracle database and Oracle development and Oracle apps. But of course it must not be Oracle, it must be the design. I say we could go in and do the FBI case system on the AS/400 in RPG and prove once and for all that record level access in RPG and COBOL (and MUMPS I read yesterday for health care systems and banks and airlines) and SAP and other proven enterprise systems is what works for enterprise level transaction processing. That includes document imaging storage and retrieval and everything else a case system needs. All available on the AS/400 at high performance that works. Whatever the current fad from the big boys is, it doesn't work. The FBI should back me up on that, at the cost of $170 million to find out. rd

[MCWebsite.Staff]

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[buck.calabro@commsoft.net]

> Most downtime encountered in I.T. > is hardware related. I don't think this is accurate, although there is an entire class of hardware failures that look like software problems. Recent studies have repeatedly shown that it is software problems that cause applications to be unavailable. Comair is the most recent example, the AT&T phone debacle is another. --buck