Competition
IDC's Worldwide Database Management Systems 2009–2013 Forecast and 2008 Vendor Shares ranks Oracle database as the leader in DBMS marketing share, followed by IBM DB2 and then Microsoft SQL Server. Other competitors include open source products such as Firebird, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Ingres, and niche players such as Sybase and MaxDB.
In 2009, Gartner declared that "IBM DB2 9.7 Shakes Up the DBMS Market With Oracle Compatibility". This headline refers to the addition to DB2 of several features that are familiar to users of Oracle Database, making it easier for people with Oracle Database skills to work with DB2. These new features include DB2 support for the most commonly used SQL, PL/SQL, and scripting syntax from Oracle Database. They also include DB2 support for additional data types and concurrency models.
In the clustered DBMS arena, where databases can grow to many terabytes, IBM offers two approaches that compete with Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC): DB2 pureScale and DB2 Database Partitioning Feature (DPF). DB2 pureScale is a shared-disk database cluster solution that is ideal for high-capacity Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) workloads. DB2 DPF lets you partition your database across multiple servers or within a large SMP server, which is ideal for Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) workloads. (Note that DB2 DPF is sold as part of IBM InfoSphere Warehouse, which is the name for DB2 when it is sold in data warehouse environments.)
DB2 for z/OS arguably has fewer direct competitors. Oracle is attracting customers to its Linux on System z products, although apparently not at the expense of DB2. Oracle has a 31-bit RDBMS available for z/OS (Oracle Database 10g Release 2), but Oracle found it difficult to compete with DB2's feature set on z/OS. Oracle has announced it will support 10g on z/OS as long as customers wish, but the company will not introduce future versions of its database product on z/OS. CA-Datacom and Software AG's ADABAS are competing databases for z/OS, and there are certain niche products as well (Model 204, SUPRA SQL, NOMAD, etc.) Non-relational databases that "compete" include IMS, and CA-IDMS, among others. At least some open source databases are ostensibly compatible with z/OS UNIX System Services.
IBM and DB2 are frequently at or near the top of the TPC-C and TPC-H industry benchmarks published on the Transaction Processing Performance Council's website.
In 2006 IBM stepped up its competition in the emerging data warehouse appliance market by releasing a product line of pre-configured hardware/software systems combining DB2 Data Warehouse Edition with either IBM system p (AIX) or IBM system x (Linux) servers. This family of "warehouse appliance-like" systems was given the name IBM Balanced Configuration Unit, or BCU, and is aimed at the warehouse appliance market typified by Netezza and DATAllegro, but it differentiates itself in that it uses the full-featured version of DB2 instead of a single-purpose warehouse-oriented RDBMS.
Read more about this topic: IBM DB2
Famous quotes containing the word competition:
“Every sect is a moral check on its neighbour. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.”
—Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864)
“Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Playing games with agreed upon rules helps children learn to live by rules, establish the delicate balance between competition and cooperation, between fair play and justice and exploitation and abuse of these for personal gain. It helps them learn to manage the warmth of winning and the hurt of losing; it helps them to believe that there will be another chance to win the next time.”
—James P. Comer (20th century)