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December 4, 2000

Database Grudge Match

IT pros sound off on the five leading relational database companies--IBM, Informix, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sybase

Illustration by Gerard Dubois

More on databases:

sidebar: Survey Methodology: How Vendors Were Ranked

sidebar: Database Administrators: A Precious Commodity

Portable Databases (11/27/00)

TechWeb: Does Oracle Really Do It All? (11/28/00)

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hen it was time to choose a database-management system for its recently launched online business, Suppleyes Inc. might have gone with the easy choice--Oracle--given that vendor's popularity among other dot-coms. Or Suppleyes might have picked Microsoft's SQL Server, since Windows 2000 is the company's computer operating system of choice. But the startup bucked convention and went with IBM's DB2 Universal Database.

"Most people don't think it's an obvious choice, but we think it is," says Perry Cain, chief technology officer of the Fairlawn, Ohio, company, which provides supply-ordering services to ophthalmic surgery centers. "If you're using Windows 2000, DB2 is the most obvious solution, believe it or not."

We might not have believed it before, but we do now. IBM came out on top in InformationWeek Research's first-ever side-by-side comparison of five leading database vendors--IBM, Informix, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sybase--in 11 categories. The survey, titled Analyzing The Relational Database Vendors, was conducted in October and is based on interviews with 303 IT professionals, including at least 50 customers of each of the vendors assessed.

Relational databases are the all-important data repositories that manage employee and customer records, financial transactions, inventory, and a wide array of other business information in companies of all sizes. According to our survey, data warehousing, accounting, and application development are the most common uses for relational databases, with more than half of the respondents using them for those applications.

It's fitting that IBM edged out Oracle for top billing in the survey--the two companies have been slugging it out since the first relational database software was made commercially available by Oracle more than 20 years ago. The market has been intensely competitive during much of that time, and it continues to be unpredictable, rhetoric-filled, and contentious. When Jeremy Burton, Oracle's senior VP of product marketing, came to New York in October to meet with journalists, he brought along a set of slides intended to show IBM's weaknesses as a software company. One slide, showing IBM's relatively higher ratio of services revenue, carried the headline "Software Is Five Times Less Strategic To IBM Than To Oracle."

Oracle is no kinder to Microsoft--nor Microsoft to Oracle. Microsoft representatives showed up at last month's Comdex trade show in Las Vegas with coffee mugs that mocked the perceived high cost of licensing Oracle's software. Oracle chairman and CEO Larry Ellison, a keynote speaker at the conference, took the bait. Less than halfway through his speech, Ellison skipped ahead to what was supposed to have been his final demonstration--a simulation of Oracle's upcoming Oracle9i database outperforming Microsoft's recently released SQL Server 2000.

"There's a reason they don't run any large Web sites," Ellison said of Microsoft, adding that Microsoft's lawyers had warned Oracle not to demonstrate Microsoft products on stage. (Oracle says the demo involved an emulation of SQL Server, not the real thing.) Ellison blamed his ornery mood during the speech on the "crummy mug."

Perry Cain Photo by Roger Mastroianni Why such rancor? A lot's at stake: The database market last year grew 18% to $8 billion, according to market researcher Dataquest. Oracle maintained a narrow lead with a 31% market share in 1999, compared with IBM's 30%. While far back with a 13% share, Microsoft has made steady gains in recent years. Only Informix and Sybase, stuck in single digits, are unable to capitalize on the market's growth.

The market is consolidating. Informix during the past few years has acquired Ardent Software, Cloudscape, Illustra Information Technologies, and Red Brick Systems. The tough, competitive nature of the market makes it difficult for other suppliers to survive, let alone thrive. Computer Associates, for example, had little success selling its relational database, Ingres, against the big five. CA is now positioning its object-oriented database, Jasmine, as a next-generation alternative.

More can be done to accommodate database users. Respondents to our survey gave database vendors a lukewarm grade of 6.8, out of a possible 10, in meeting their requirements across all the criteria measured. Vendors did best in the bread-and-butter product and technical areas--certainly good news for the many businesses that depend on databases to support critical applications such as Web sites, data marts, and transaction-processing systems. As a group, they scored a 7.6 in the area of reliability and availability, 7.4 in scalability, and 7.2 in features and innovation.

Move beyond those core competencies, however, and database vendors don't fare as well. They scored 6.7 for customer service and responsiveness, 6.5 for product pricing and value, 6.0 for service-level agreements, and a poor 5.7 for providing strategic business advice.

Database reliability and availability were ranked as the top "must have" attributes by survey respondents. "The more bulletproof and reliable it is, the more important it is to me," says Paul Vossbrinck, an application project manager consultant who works in GE Capital Corp.'s treasury operations in Stamford, Conn.

Besides reliability and availability, IT executives put a premium on customer service and responsiveness, features and vendor innovation, scalability, and price and value, in that order, in ranking the importance of things a database vendor brings to the table. Criteria such as providing customer referrals and a vendor's ability to offer strategic business advice were deemed less important.

The high ratings given reliability (9.3 on a scale of 1 to 10) and scalability (8.1) underscore the importance that IT managers attach to the systems that support core business functions. Ten years ago, databases chugged away in company basements processing bills and paychecks; today, they're a critical component of E-business infrastructures. A database that's out of order can quickly lead to lost customers and revenue. "The features that were once important only to the Boeings of the world are now important to everyone," says Oracle's Burton.

That may be one of the few things that Oracle and IBM agree on. "If the system is down or there's a data-integrity problem, you're out of business," says Janet Perna, general manager of IBM's data-management division. The emphasis on reliability reflects the role that databases play as the "core of the E-infrastructure," Perna says. "If you think of information as the currency of the New Economy, then that currency needs to be stored somewhere."

Survey respondents gave IBM and its DB2 database a score of 8.6 for reliability and availability and 8.8 for scalability. They're small but meaningful differences over Oracle's scores of 8.1 and 8.4, respectively.

"Most people think of DB2 as a legacy database. It's not," says Suppleyes' Cain. In particular, Cain likes DB2's reliability and parallel-processing capabilities, features he says his company will need as it processes a growing number of transactions. "There's going to be some heavy-duty database traffic here," he predicts.