I think the original point was that they were asking if it was a big deal to convert one way or the other, (which it isn't). Both products will do what people want it to do and do it well. People used to get pretty rabid about which one was better, (like the beer commercial), but that doesn't appear to be the case any more for very many products.
While there are differences in the use of some features and configuration, it's really not hard to change from one sort vendor to the other. Aside from cost, a site that isn't going to do a complete benchmark on their own data to see which one is the "best" for them probably really doesn't even care if one or the other is a few percentage points better if the cost of the one that is slightly slower is better. Unfortunately, (or maybe not) there are several products that are becoming a commodity, (Sort being one of them, Syncsort, DF/Sort, CA-Sort), and the differences between them are less noticeable for some sites, so it comes down to money. I'm sure a lot of sites run CA-Sort because they "got a deal", and many of them might actually love the product. ;) I believe that software should be affordable, (not free, just affordable), especially with products like these where the development and software costs have probably been recovered 10 to 20 years ago. But I'm sure they have stock holders to keep happy. Brian ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
