Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Choosing your platform based on TCA?

I giggled at "The Total Cost of Administration Champ: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or Oracle Database 10g" over on ComputerWorld.com.

I've been in this business 17 years working in countless companies. I've implemented everything from cancer protocol databases to telecom billing systems and I can tell you management has never looked at the Annual TCA per database user as a deciding factor.

I can't believe people are actually paid to come up with these numbers. Lets see an apples to apples comparison. For example, put Oracle and MS SQL on the same hardware on Windows XP (yes, I'm going against my "Never Windoz" philosophy, but last I checked, MS SQL wasn't available on Linux). Then run ApplicationX against both platforms and measure number of customer complaints/hour for each system. Now measure how long it takes to solve those problems until customer is satisfied. That's a real number.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Giggled? You? Surely not!

Jeff Hunter said...

giggled like a school girl, I did...

my word: dioxkop - hazmat inspector

Anonymous said...

Maybe the only user was the Admin.