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Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 09/17/05 13:57
DA Morgan (damorgan@psoug.org) writes:
> Just kidding. I guess I my views are somewhat outmoded given that I
> deal in large line-of-business commercial applications. Did you find
> any for Oracle? DB2? Informix? Sybase? ... Didn't think so.
You may have a point there so far, that it depends a little on which market
you aim at. I don't know about Oracle, but SQL Server may be different
since Microsoft aimes a wider market spectrum. Basically, anything from
the local sports club to large enterprise systems, whereas Oracle does
not provide anything similar to MSDE/SQL Express, that is a free engine
for small-scale applicaiton. (But I since I don't follow Oracle at all,
I may be totally wrong.)
If the market mainly is companies of some size, public betas are maybe
not that meaningful. There are other channels that may be better.
A competitor to SQL Server in the low-end market, and also in the
middle market is MySQL. And sure enough, if you go to http://www.mysql.com
you can download their 5.0. Which is a beta version.
> Public Betas are not unethical. Using them as the basis for books and
> production systems is I hope you would agree.
No, I don't agree. If there is an interest in a beta product, I see
nothing wrong with writing a book about it. (And while encouraged by
Microsoft, the books are independent publications.) As for production
systems, I would expect Oracale as well put quite a few installations
live on their new versions, both inside and outside Oracle before they
make an official release. If they do not, I would be very worried as a
potential customer. There simply is no such thing is no such test as a
production environment...
--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se
Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/productdoc/2000/books.asp
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