Re: What so special about PostgreSQL and other RDBMS?
From: Jerry Gitomer (jgitomer_at_erols.com)
Date: 05/20/04
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Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 01:32:01 -0400
On Thu, 20 May 2004 00:00:48 +0000, Doug Hutcheson wrote:
Big snip here
>
> There are large companies in our industry who are famous for
> implementing backward-incompatibility in new versions of their software.
> Further, most support is time limited: once the software has reached a
> certain age, the vendor demands that you upgrade (at your cost) if you
> want to continue to receive support and bug fixes. Clearly, that makes
> good commercial sense and nobody would dispute their right to drop
> suport for old products, but it does lock customers into an "upgrade or
> else" cost cycle. If a customer decides not to upgrade, the vendor has
> effectively broken the code for the customer as soon as the next bug or
> insecurity is encountered: no support means no fix.
>
> The point here is that current commercial practice by many vendors
> forces clients into expensive upgrades which have no direct commercial
> benefit to the customer. Quirk's propositions present a scenario under
> which customers have the freedom to choose what to upgrade and how much
> to spend, based on their own business imperatives and not those of a
> third party on which they depend.
>
> After 25 years in the industry, I know of many organisations which are
> getting heartily sick of spending vast sums of money in knee-jerk
> upgrades (which usually involves staff retraining and other ancilliary
> expenses) at the whim of a vendor. When I am able to offer my customers
> an alternative to this revenue drain, I am happy to do so. It is not
> always possible or appropriate, but when it is, the benefits are exactly
> as Quirk has laid out.
>
Doug,
If you are dealing with the right vendor the cost of upgrades is included
in your support contract. When I was an active DBA working with Oracle
and Informix all I had to do was make a phone call and the manuals and
media for any currently supported version magically arrived -- at no
charge -- within a week. I would install the latest version on my test
system and see if the developers or quality control people ran into any
problems -- they never did. I would then install on the development boxes
and after a couple of weeks of complaint free (well, as complaint free as
developers ever are) work I would install on the production systems and
provide the operations staff with a set of scripts that made the new
version the active one and tested it to run after the backup was
completed. (Just in case I had them keep the back up in house instead of
sending it out for off-site storage the next morning -- but I never ever
needed that backup.)
Eureka, a painless and inexpensive upgrade.
To summarize there was no incremental cost for either software or manuals.
Since I was on salary there was no additional labor cost to install and
test a latter version.
Jerry
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