John Slee wrote: > Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > > I agree with you, and I agree with what I said, that you disagreed > > with. ;-) We just have apparently a different perspective on what > > you're likely to do in the future > > Yes. IME companies are far more likely to switch applications than to > switch databases and keep the same application. So what was the point > again? > > FWIW $EMP is a software company that sells apps tied to one DB product. > This has never to my knowledge been a sales blocker. The customers see > the DB as a "background" requirement and if they're not familiar with > the DB platform (eg. if it's not what they use for their other apps) we > help them out. > > There's far more to this mythical database platform agnosticity than the > mere proclamation of "yay, no SQL errors!"
There are levels of agnosticity. When database knowledge is tightly coupled into application logic you inherit the same set of problems that come with tightly coupling data representation and display. MVC and other design patterns are commonly used to ward off such problems. An example of the dangers lurking in closely coupling a database to an app: my shop's multi-million dollar ERP has a key feature based on a port from Visual Firefox replete with fixed-field data, thus inflicting maintenance costs onto a new database platform. We absorb these costs in application licensing fees. Any vendor entering this market won't need to pour resources into this brittle nightmare, so they'll have a competitive cost advantage. Another cost to consider is licensing. If the database licensing model is by seat or CPU, the vendor is likely quite good at extracting lucre, just shy of damaging your ability to renew. In my shop, database licensing soaks up a sizable fraction of non-labor costs. Extend the annual fees by the number of years you plan to be in business, discount for future-value of money, add in opportunity costs (licensing fees might instead be spent on market development). Training and mindshare costs are real yet hard to account for. Consider the required reading to install and operate your database. Vendors undoubtedly profit by obligating customers to retrain/relearn with each major release. We become so occupied with the minutiae of upgrading and patching a product that we starve efforts to consider alternatives. This becomes cultural lock-in. There is sometimes an advantage for open source products that depend more on refinement than expansion, so less retraining is needed. Consider the case of Apache vs. IIS. -- Charles Polisher _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
