Our family is a dying breed – the classic Middle Class American Family of the latter half of the 20th Century. Upper affluent but not ostentatiously so. You could see it in the choice of Family cars: A Mercury, a Pontiac station wagon, An Oldsmobile 88 Cutlass, and then Dad went on a splurge. A short stay with a Mercedes Benz 350, a BMW 2002 Tii, a Saab story, another BM “double V”.
But there never was in the line up a Cadillac. Father looked but never bought. I never looked or rode in one until I was driven by a Cadillac limousine to the airport about 8 years ago. I was stunned – this was really a sumptuous ride. Smooth, quiet, smooth, plenty of pickup and power, smooth, well-appointed – smooth. I had a talk with the driver and he insisted the price/performance ratio was right too – he said that if he was going to be driving 7-9 hours per day, he was going to do it in the most enjoyable ride he could find.
That was my first encounter with the Cadillac brand. Doing the series of reviews of the “free databases” (DB2, MySQL, Oracle), I have had my second encounter with Cadillac – and it is DB2 9 Express C Viper edition.
Now I am about 1/4 of the way through the reviews so I may yet regret writing this note. All the price performance tests are far from complete. But so far, DB2 has been the Cadillac to the feisty, Ford Cobra that is Oracle Express and the upwardly mobile Hyundai Sonata that is MySQL 5.0.
So do try one or all of these “free” databases being reviewed. I have the free in quotes because there are restrictions on deployment and support. As for functionality, the takeaways are so far minimal and decidely high end functional features (clustering, grid and parallel operations). MySQL and DB2 are the least restrictive while Oracle Express has some takeaways but users are getting an awful lot of 10g.
But for sure take DB2 Express C Viper edition out for a test drive. See if you dont get that Cadillac, well-built feeling.
(c)JBSurveyer 2007
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