November 12, 2001

Enterprise Foundation Part II

If a database is going to shine, it's going to do it in an e-business application. Of Oracle9i and IBM UDB, which shines more brilliantly? (And how luminous is Microsoft SQL Server?)

By Tim Quinlan

Continued from Page 1

Oracle and UDB both support the local needs of international systems. They provide globalization and Unicode support. Both databases let you do all of the following online: change schemas, reorganize, and set the amount of memory. UDB delivers more parameters that can be changed online than Oracle does , but third-party support of Oracle on the Intel and Unix platforms outpaces UDB's.

Application and Data Management

Both databases support the major Internet standards, such as Java 2 Enterprise Edition, XML, simple object access protocol, universal description, discovery, and integration, and the unified modeling language. They also have excellent connectivity, through such standards and products as Java Messaging System, ORBs (both CORBA and Enterprise JavaBeans [EJB]), EDI, and IBM MQSeries. Database Replication and Oracle's Advanced Queuing. Java, JDBC, and SQLJ are supported in both databases.

DB2 implements EJB and Java servlets through WebSphere integration; Oracle implements them directly in the database. This illustrates a difference between IBM's best-of-breed philosophy vs. Oracle's everything-in-the-database philosophy. Another interesting example of this difference is in the way the companies have implemented Java virtual machines (JVMs). Oracle has a built-in JVM, whereas IBM uses the platform-implemented JVM. The benefit of Oracle's is that whenever you implement Oracle, you have a built-in JVM; the downside is that you may not get the best JVM for that platform.

The application vendor viewpoint has been greatly documented in the past year. Vendors such as Siebel Systems Inc., SAP, and PeopleSoft are heavily promoting DB2 as their database of choice. Some (Siebel, for example) are using it as their own in-house database. This is a big score for IBM, but is heavily offset by the fact that the majority of sites have already implemented their systems on the Oracle database.

The XML document is a new data type implemented in both databases. XML can still be partitioned into relational tables or implemented as BLOBs. XML-aware text search is also provided. Oracle implements extensibility and object/relational DBMS (ORDBMS) capabilities in the database as well as multimedia options that support data - such as text, audio, and video. IBM has been a leader in implementing UDB as an ORDBMS through its Relational Extenders as a generally available offering since 1995. IBM's offering showed a clear vision of the future and provided as clean an implementation as the standards would allow at the time (before SQL-99). Relational Extenders also deliver many multimedia data types.

IBM's Net.data connection management provides continuous connections from Web servers to the database, relieving many connections to the database. Another tool, Web Application Builder, is designed to access UDB. It provides such features as XML output, XHTML compatibility, and SQL statement nesting.

Oracle has a unique feature and interesting piece of technology in its Internet File System (iFS). Put simply, iFS lets you map the Oracle database to a Windows Explorer drive. Through this mechanism, files can be copied to the mapped Oracle drive, where they are ultimately stored in a BLOB in the database. IFS also enables browser access to documents, security, and versioning. The trick will be to exploit this technology for business benefits. Oracle is also packaging an Internet Developer Suite that includes application development tools, BI tools, XML Developer's Kit, Portlet Developer Kit, Jdeveloper, Forms Developer, Designer, Reports Developer, Discoverer, Repository, and Oracle Warehouse Builder.

On the application coding front, DB2 has lacked some basic functionality until now. In the "it's about time" category, SQL procedural language stored procedures are available across DB2, as are triggers implemented through procedural logic. DB2's procedural SQL is based on SQL-99 standards. Oracle's PL/SQL is a proprietary language, but more mature than DB2's procedural SQL offering. PL/SQL performs well, is easy to use, is production-tested, and is an advantage to Oracle developers.

And the Winner Is ...

To choose the best database for your e-business suite, you will want to consider the technologies implemented in your company and the characteristics that will influence your database choices. Your corporate technology mix and standards will go a long way toward helping you make your database choice.

Then there's the total cost of ownership (TCO) issue. Database implementers may feel that basing a database purchase decision largely on pricing is shortsighted and uninformed. They may have a valid point, but pricing really does matter. Your job will be to determine the TCO at the enterprise level. When doing this, beware of extra charges for things you may have assumed were included in the base product, and think about where your chosen products' prices may be one or two years in the future.

Companies are taking a hard look at both of these products. When analyzing a new database, it may appear that SQL is SQL and the features are similar, but the differences between them, with regard to application development and database administration are not trivial. Administration is the largest concern, because only the shared concepts are standard when it comes to administering different DBMSs. All those well-used scripts, tricks, and automation techniques that DBAs and developers have generated will be lost on a new DBMS. Don't overlook this consideration, or your DBMS decision may result in missed deadlines and lost business opportunities.

The good news is that your decision is not as difficult as you may think. It may very likely be made without intense feature comparison. A feature-by-feature comparison may make it difficult to determine a clear product winner. The real winner in all of this is you, the consumer. IBM is forcing Oracle to become more customer- and price-focused, and Oracle has forced IBM to develop a more complete offering across product lines and become a more aggressive marketer. A little competition is a great thing! Let's hope it continues in our industry.

Thanks to Bill Wong and Dan Gibson of IBM, Greg Martell of Oracle, Jeff Ressler of Microsoft, and Grant Zolkavich of North Technology Partners for their input into this article.

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Tim Quinlan [tquinlan@tlqconsulting.com] is a database consultant based in Toronto. He has more than 20 years of experience designing and implementing OLTP and data warehousing databases.

Differentiators At a Glance

Microsoft SQL Server and E-Business

In order to become a high-end database server in the way that UDB and Oracle have in the Unix and mainframe world, Microsoft must prove that it can perform, scale, and deliver high availability in a way that threatens the competition. Where does Microsoft currently stand?

To deliver higher performance and scalability, SQL Server 2000 scales to 32 processors in a symmetric multiprocessor environment and also operates as a shared-nothing clustering implementation. At the time of this writing, SQL Server 2000 has the top overall and top clustered TPC-C benchmarks for OLTP. The TPC-W (Web e-commerce) is perhaps a better benchmark for e-business systems. In this space, SQL Server is performing extremely well, holding positions 1 through 5 at the 10,000-item count and positions 1 and 4 at the 100,000-item count. SQL Server delivers the best price performance ratio in both of these categories. TPCs should be taken for what they are worth, but they do provide a sample point of database performance and Microsoft is using the TPCs to make its point that SQL Server 2000 can perform.

SQL Server ensures high availability through features seen in UDB and Oracle9i. Failover clustering supports business continuity (rather than disaster recovery). It comes with the Enterprise Edition, operating with two nodes using Windows 2000 Advanced Server and four nodes with Datacenter Server. Fail-over clustering can operate in active-passive mode, where the passive server waits for a fail over, or in active-active mode, where both servers are online and one can fail over to the other. For disaster recovery, log shipping features can ship transaction logs to a remote site where they are subsequently applied. Microsoft claims to have mission-critical sites at the 99.99-percent availability range. High availability is of course dependent on the underlying Windows platform's stability.

Microsoft has taken a similar approach toward performance, scalability, and high availability as IBM and Oracle have. There are, however, a few differentiators worth mentioning. SQL Server provides access to external data not via gateways but rather with Microsoft Data Access Components, which is included in many Microsoft products. Microsoft has not been as quick to implement Java in the database as IBM and Oracle have. However, it is now responding to market pressures and is planning to support SQL Server data access from Java. SQL Server currently supports ANSI SQL-92. SQL-99 support is an area where we can hope to see SQL Server improvements in future releases.

Microsoft's price/performance and total cost of ownership can't be ignored. What it now needs is some time to prove to customers that its results can be sustained. By the way, the next major release of SQL Server is code-named Yukon and, according to Jeff Ressler, lead product manager for SQL Server, Microsoft plans to release it in 2003.

RESOURCES

Read Part I, focusing on BI features

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