Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!sce!cognos!nigelc From: nigelc@cognos.UUCP (Nigel Campbell) Newsgroups: comp.databases Subject: Re: SYBASE, ORACLE or POWERHOUSE? Message-ID: <8141@cognos.UUCP> Date: 3 Apr 90 20:31:49 GMT References: <8113@cognos.UUCP> Reply-To: nigelc@cognos.UUCP (Nigel Campbell) Organization: Cognos Inc., Ottawa, Canada Lines: 27 It is a shame that you grew to hate our products so much . In my experience of users 'hating' the product (this covers 5+yrs with Cognos) in Europe and North America I frequently found that two trends repeated themselves 1. The designers/programmers/users never took a course . 2. The database/file designs were not normalised or denormalised for i/o,locking conflicts etc . I will give you a classic example of a user quoting what a pig the product was Benchmark : Read approx 3+ million records in 1 Vax/Rms file and perform some summing of males,females etc etc They screamed that Quiz was taking so long that they killed it after 12+ cpu hours!!!! A Cobol program however only took 9 Cpu hours . The user said it would be 'nice' to run the program at least once a day ... good luck if it took 9 hours on an empty Vax . Cognos Support and Development were asked what was up and what to do . The final answer which made both Quiz and Cobol look good was simple , summarise the data in an appropriate form and dynamically update the sums from the data entry screens . Net result was the reports ran under 20 miuntes elapsed (never heard what the cpu time was). Digital Review looked at Powerhouse early last year I think and compared it against other dec-tools ...... we came out quite favorably !!