Many apologies to the readers of PLM Savvy for such a lengthy silence. I have been at various customer sites providing deployment and consulting services for the past few months. I’ll be starting to get more updates going again - I have many more case studies to share with you as I am also launching into new levels of PLM consulting and services.
Stay tuned…
Sorry for the confusion on changing the setup of this site, but the layout I had was not conducive to having tables and images. This new layout allows my content onto the site much more cleanly. Now that this is working better I will be updating some of the older postings to make the images more legible.
I was preparing to set up the basic framework of a commercial PLM system at a customer site recently and ended up finding a engineering vs IT debate in progress. Engineering wanted the most pre-built quick to deploy system the selected vendor could provide so readily signed a PO with the vendor for a solution that required the use of MS SQL 2005. When I arrived to do the readiness check, I found that IT was adamantly opposed to MS SQL and would prefer the route of implementing the next tier PLM system (requiring more configuration work) in order to remain with their database environment - Oracle. Thus the age old debate renewed itself. Personally I don’t have a preferance - there are business decisions that warrant the use of either system. It was getting past the hyperbole that I realized was really the issue as this topic does come up often.
So first what are the top tier PLM Vendor trends with supporting the two environments.
Agile - Supported Oracle and MS SQL when they first launched, withdrew support for MS SQL 5 years later, and recently renewed support, September 2006(see http://www.agile.com/pressreleases/index.asp?view=566
Dessault - Supports MS SQL as of November 2005 (see http://www.3ds-microsoft.com/news/2005%2011%2007.pdf)
PTC - Hot off the press - announcing MS SQL support as of Jan. 17, 2007 (see http://www.tenlinks.com/NEWS/PR/PTC/011707_microsoft.htm)
UGS - Has supported MS SQL since October 2004 (see http://www.ugs.com/about_us/press/press.shtml?id=3856)
Why is it that these companies are willing to invest in the architectual changes required to add the support for MS SQL. Obviously this was not a decision to be taken lightly. The NUMBER ONE reason is that the buyers of PLM systems today are in the “mid-market” and the majority of mid-market companies struggle with Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). While many may argue that Oracle is very cost effective, it tends to be the long term costs of skilled Oracle DBA’s that drive the TCO up.
Yet the bias I hear “against” the use of MS SQL - is often based in the historical distrust of Microsoft and concerns about security holes - so I found the linked report by David Lichtfield, fascinating in that it really addresses the question of the security holes “myth”
As I said - I don’t really care which database server I setup customers PLM systems on. The ones I’ve deployed that use both - don’t seem much different from the adminstration of the PLM applications in and of themselves. The vast majority of the time the configuration does not involve even interacting with the database at the database server level after the initial database creation. So if the install scripts work, and the customer wants one over the other - I’ll make sure I understand the reasons, advise them on any issues and move on.
Copyright 2007, LR Hirr, All Rights Reserved
