Just to clarify, you get a $25 credit for Amazon Web Services which is meant to offset the cost of the AWS you use during the course. It's not like a $25 Amazon gift card.
there have been a few studies by Oracle that use some questionable to put it mildly methodologies. This one uses standardized and accepted methodology.
On the limitations of the free DB2 Express-C. We did make a very conscious decision to make REAL DB2 available at no charge and not some crippled version like Microsoft and Oracle "Express" database offerings. Why? We wanted to create an opportunity for anyone regardless of their financial situation to be able to get the benefit of all of the DB2 features and be able to use it not just to learn but to actually use in real applications. This means that without paying IBM a cent, you can use DB2 in any and all of your projects. You can even redistribute DB2 as part of your application without paying any royalties to IBM. And, if you find yourself fortunate enough to have created a very popular piece of software that needs more resources (memory and CPU power) then all you need to do is replace the license and you now have more processing capacity. Think of it. No need to rewrite a single line of code; no need to even have access to source.
Btw. the price to move up to more resources and full IBM 24x7 support is exactly the same as what you would pay for equivalent MySQL support option. http://freedb2.com/2008/03/13/free-db2-is-cheaper-than-mysql...
Robert Yong in his post tries to speculate and pontificate. One thing about speculation is that you will likely get things wrong. And he gets it wrong on every point. He does not have any insight in to what went in IBM. Take it from someone who does.
Just because someone has a blog does not make him an expert.
- Another post in that series includes a comment which clarifies what is and is not included in DB2v9.7 Express-C:
http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/db2luw/db2-97-announced-by-ibm-i...
["What is not yet included in Express-C is PL/SQL support, CLPplus or build in package libraries (DBMS_PIPE, UTL_SMTP, etc)."]
>I believe development on pureXML was recently canceled.
Where do you get information like that? Nothing could be further from the truth.
>When Facebook built one of the largest data systems around with MySQL+memcache and other open source software, it makes you wonder why you need "enterprise" solutions.
Well, you start with understanding the needs of the application. Facebook and your neighbourhood bank have vastly different needs. When half of your friends see a post on the wall and the others don't for a few minutes nobody gets unhappy or even notices it. Ever wanted to deal with the bank which withdraws money from one account but does not deposit it in to another for a few days?
MySQL is a fine database for many applications but just because it is used by Facebook or Yahoo does not make it the right fit for every application. Just because DB2 is used by every fortune 1000 does not make it the right fir for Yahoo either.
MySQL is typically not a great fit when you need to scale transactional workloads. Most people don't attempt to run MySQL on anything larger than a 4-processor machine and opt for horizontal scalability based on Master-Slave replication. Can be a solution when slaves falling behind the master is not an issue (e.g Facebook) but will not work very well if you need transactional integrity for your data. Can MySQL be made to scale on larger machines? Yes, if you are Google you can and they will be contributing their bits to v5.4 of MySQL. For the rest of us who need to do enterprise apps it si quite a bit easier to pick a DBMS that does it already and has proven itself. That means DB2, Oracle etc.
