Curt Monash has a post up talking about IBM adding Oracle emulation capabilities to DB2. I hadn't heard about that before, but it's certainly interesting.

We used to have all kinds of strategies in PeopleSoft to try help the non-Oracle database vendors do better, but of course none of that stopped Oracle from having a larger RDBMS market share for PeopleSoft customers than all of the other database vendors combined. I don't think that Oracle ever dipped below 60% or so of the PeopleSoft customer base.

One piece of advice that I have given to people from IBM before when they would come to Pleasanton for meetings is that if you really wanted to make headway against Oracle in PeopleSoft shops that hadn't already standardized on a single RDBMS you need to focus on availability of skills. It's not just about the number of DBAs that are out there either (although there were and probably still are more Oracle DBAs than other platforms).

Consider the situation where a PeopleSoft customer would bring in an outside consultant on a project involving some application customization. What are the odds that the consultant is familiar enough with Oracle that they don't need to call the DBA every 10 minutes to help them? Pretty good.

You would think that familiarity with the underlying platform would be a prerequisite for someone hiring a consultant, right? It would, except that in many cases with PeopleSoft work, it's possible to get a lot done without digging into the underlying platform. The problem is in those cases where it's 80% application level work and 20% platform. Someone with the right PeopleSoft skills trumps someone with the underlying platform skills when the task at hand is so heavily weighted towards the application work.

Even when the platform percentage is smaller than 20% of the work, it will still slow down a project when those skills are not readily available. And the business sponsors of the project don't like the words "slow down" :-)

I know that there some of are shaking your heads right now and saying "that's no way to run things". And you're right. But it's the way that it happens in the real world more often than you might think. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.





I actually don't have that shirt, but I like it :-)

Labels: 2009, Database, DB2, Oracle