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Microsoft on DB2

Microsoft has put up videos of a competitive comparison of SQLServer and DB2. Some of the information is kind of sketchy, or does not fully disclose aspects of SQLserver or DB2, but most of their criticisms and explanations of DB2 are accurate. You may be surprised to hear me say the words "Microsoft" and "accurate" in the same sentence given my experiences with Microsoft's dissembling marketing.

Al Hilwa's commentary is interesting in light of his one-time Gartner background. Gartner loves DB2, very likely for reasons I don't want to write about now - IT analyst services require a long article of their own.

I like the way one of the segments reveals a big element of IBM's DB2 marketing strategy: DB2 is really 3 different products depending on which platform you are running on. Each major platform (mainframe, unix, as400/I-series) has a separate code base. IBM uses the DB2 moniker to tout the long history of DB2 and its stability, when in fact that may apply only one of the three versions of the product. It gives them the ability to market DB2 without revealing that specific features or performance do not apply to the version you are looking at.

On Microsoft's front, they raise the specter of Total Cost of Ownership. Microsoft should be slammed for this, given the fuzziness with which they produce TCO for SQLServer and TCO for DB2. Using their approach the TCO for a Palm Pilot would likely run to five figures. One aspect of their TCO argument is valid though: just because you have mainframe DB2 DBAs does not mean the skills are any more transferable to Unix-DB2 than they are to running Oracle-Unix or to SQLServer. IBM sales will often tout the fact that you can leverage your DBAs across platforms.

These videos give you a good perspective on how Microsoft views SQLServer positioning against DB2, and what they say to sell against DB2. The criticisms of DB2 and IBM are mostly valid, but the touting of SQLServer should be viewed skeptically. Not a technically heavy presentation, but a good overview.

Posted by Mark Wednesday, May 14, 2003 3:08:00 PM | permalink |