DSXchange

Hi All,
We were asked to present the Pros and Cons for using Oracle as repository against DB2 since there is no DB2 admin available in the organisation. Is there a document or points somewhere to get the Pros and Cons of using Oracle for Xmeta??

Please provide hints if there is no specific document available...

Thanks in advance!!

Not that I know of, but you've mentioned the single most important factor for your organisation that outweighs other factors.

Technically there's no difference which database you choose for the metadata repository. Therefore the only pros and cons will be based on some kind of business case.

DB2 Pros
- DB2 comes free with DataStage, Oracle will require some type of license. This may not be a problem if your company has an Oracle enterprise license.
- DB2 gets installed automatically with an installation of DataStage, Oracle has to be installed separately. This is a minor consideration for companies with an Oracle DBA team.
- I have over the years seen a couple defects in DataStage that occurred for an Oracle repository but not a DB2 repository leading me to believe IBM do more testing of DB2 XMETA. These defects are rare and tend to be fixed by IBM in patches and fix packs.
- At risk of opening a can of worms I think you will need more DBA time for tuning Oracle than DB2. If you want to start using Metadata Workbench, Business Glossary and Metadata Asset Manager then you will find you are running large or frequent queries against XMETA and as it gets larger you need to tune it.

Oracle Pros
The main advantages are in having DBA support for XMETA:
- Your DBA team will know how to set up back and recovery for XMETA.
- Your DBAs are more experienced at optimizing Oracle than DB2 for XMETA query performance from Metadata Workbench. So tuning in Oracle may be faster than learning how turning works in DB2.

Thanks a lot!! These points give me the exact cases to present.