Hi Mike,

-=> On 17 Feb 97  23:43:15 Mike Bilow said to William Geiger <=-


 MB> Platform independent database engines don't exactly seem like the wave
 MB> of the future to me.  

Oracle is totally committed to Platfrom independent database.
They give away free copies of their OS/2 offering - phone them and ask.
Its a great product - industrial strength etc, but does not have
the front end that dBase has. (Neither does DB/2_).

 MB> It has never really been an OS/2 market, but
 MB> this is primarily because OS/2 is not especially strong at database
 MB> serving by comparison with, say, Unix.  

Can't see why it shouldnt be though. Conceptually OS/2's 
multitasking is more suited to database serving than Unix's.
IBM could go far on this. I presume they are afraid of
taking market from mainframes - this is a doomed strategy.
They should know from the history of the mini and micro that
the technology will take the business if its cheaper, even if
IBM dont supply the product. (Same to DEC with knobs on).

 MB> On the other hand, there are
 MB> people who take NT seriously as a database server, and that is
 MB> inexplicable. 

Never tried it, but the magazines said it handled more users than OS/2 
on the same hardware. 

Given the fact that the number of database servers must be growing 
fast, while the games market mst be saturating, IBM really ought
to try to get OS/2 into the server market. Compaines with less than
100 people are really not going to go for big iron, cos they don't
have the skills to support it. They normally have PC literate people
though.

Andrew


... When I was a lad, you could get an O/S on a 360k floppy disk...
--- Blue Wave/Max v2.30 [NR]