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  1. Opinion: Are Third Party Vendors Worth the Money? (19 messages)

    • Posted by: Dion Almaer
    • Posted on: May 15 2003 14:00 EDT
    The SDTimes.com has writen an article discussing how/if you can justify spending money on third party tools, such as database drivers. Database vendors tend to ship their own ODBC/JDBC/proprietary drivers, so why would you spend money on third party ones? The article tells you why.

    - Some vendors just check off "JDBC driver" and don't put any real work into it
    - Some vendors try to lock you into their driver
    - Some third party tools have many more features
    - Some third party tools give you enhanced performance
    - Some claim their tools are more secure

    "According to some vendors, the free native drivers are inherently insecure, because they enable any ODBC-compliant application to get at the company’s data."

    Read: Free Connection can be Costly

    How many of you use the database drivers? How many try other drivers? How many do benchmarks on the performance differences? Do you agree with the points in the article?
    Reply to this

    Threaded Messages (19)

  2. Not Microsoft[ Go to top ]

    When they say "database" they must not mean Microsoft. Until recently, Microsoft didn't provide a JDBC driver. They're working on one now - but it's very early and doesn't work well (for me anyway).
    Reply to this Reply to original

  3. Not Microsoft[ Go to top ]

    I've been using the free Microsoft JDBC driver for a year now. I have no complaints. Actually it seems to perform quite well.

    MS JDBC
    Reply to this Reply to original

  4. Not Microsoft[ Go to top ]

    Why have M$ called it JDBC and not C#DBC?
    Reply to this Reply to original

  5. Not Microsoft[ Go to top ]

    I have been using Microsoft JDBC driver for 1 year, Now it is pretty stable and it support 2 phase commit with websphere 4+ versions. They did have some bugs till Nov-2002 last year related to Advanced features.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  6. Yes, Microsoft[ Go to top ]

    I have to agree, the Microsoft driver actually seems to work pretty well now--we've been using it for the best part of a year.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  7. ms driver troubles[ Go to top ]

    The Microsoft JDBC driver has some small annoying quirks

    you cannot reread a field in a resultset.

    this has given me trouble both with hibernate and with the JDBCStore for JMS in Weblogic 7.0

    Why on earth this is is beyond me

    sincerely
    morten wilken
    Reply to this Reply to original

  8. Not Microsoft[ Go to top ]

    The Microsoft SQL Server JDBC driver is OEM'd from a third party (Merant, I think).

    Peace,

    Cameron Purdy
    Tangosol, Inc.
    Coherence: Easily share live data across a cluster!
    Reply to this Reply to original

  9. So write their own?[ Go to top ]

    How many vendors of appservers and the like actually write their own?

    We've been having some grief on one of our lower level Jrun clusters where the Macromedia supplied drivers are awfully buggy. Having done some research into their driver package I found that core libraries were/or appear to have been produced by a company called DataDirect Technologies. Our ones, particularly sybase were exhibiting bugs which have been fixed by datadirect in the latest release but not passed onto us from MM. We're going to roll into the Standard Sybase provided JConnect soon. All I can say is, if you use a driver, try to make sure you can go direct to the developer for support.

    Max
    Reply to this Reply to original

  10. Opinion: Are Third Party Vendors Worth the Money?[ Go to top ]

    There are things that I worry, but not a JDBC driver. Its too low level, and I prefer to use free drivers until I reach a serious bug. To me, free drivers are working very well.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  11. JConnect is unbeaten for speed[ Go to top ]

    We use Sybase JConnect drivers but we tried out a third party one from a company whose name escapes me. JConnect was far superior performance-wise so we stuck with it. I don't think much of third party JDBC drivers.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  12. JConnect is unbeaten for speed[ Go to top ]

    Just to add my experience here - we use JRun 4 and attempted to use the drivers that came with that product for Sybase - we experienced a number of problems with those and went back to JConnect - it works very well. I agree with the sentiment of using the free drivers until we experience serious problems (performance or otherwise). At least to this point, the free drivers (from Oracle and Sybase) work very well for what we do.

    Cheers
    Ray
    Reply to this Reply to original

  13. JConnect is unbeaten for speed[ Go to top ]

    As per my post above, this is exactly what we're going to do for Jrun4, out of interest, what kinds of issues were you having with the MM supplied drivers? I'm just wondering if there is some correlation. We get things like Object already closed, broken pipe, timeouts on simple queries and errors on connections which are never reaped.

    Regards,
    Max
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  14. JConnect is unbeaten for speed[ Go to top ]

    Max -
    We got many of those same errors (it has been some time since we first looked at this so my memory is a bit foggy). Timeouts was a particularly persistent error.

    Cheers
    Ray
    Reply to this Reply to original

  15. Opinion: Are Third Party Vendors Worth the Money?[ Go to top ]

    At least for me, one of the biggest advantages of using third-party drivers is that they can remove the need for proprietary code in the database access layer. For instance, I like the Oracle drivers I have worked with (7 and 8), but they require proprietary code for getting a result set from a stored procedure. Using for instance Merant driver you can use the same code as for most other databases.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  16. Opinion: Are Third Party Vendors Worth the Money?[ Go to top ]

    I've had lots of success with I-Net's opta drivers and JTurbo - which now belongs to New Atlanta I believe. I've also been playing around with jTDS an open source TDS driver for MSSQL and so far it seems to be really cool, a good JDBC implementation based on FreeTDS, plus you can pop open the source and root around if you like.

    http://jtds.sourceforge.net/
    Reply to this Reply to original

  17. Opinion: Are Third Party Vendors Worth the Money?[ Go to top ]

    I wasted a lot of time trying to get Oracle's own XADataSource implementation to work in my environment. Then I switched to DataDirect and things were up and running in literally 5 minutes.

    Interestingly, nor IBM nor Oracle has a JDBC 3.0 compliant driver for their database yet. Plenty of third-party drivers though (see
    http://servlet.java.sun.com/products/jdbc/drivers).
    Reply to this Reply to original

  18. Comparison Matrix?[ Go to top ]

    So perhaps some kind of driver evaluation matrix with comments attached from those of us on the ground would be useful? Seeing as how these things are pretty critical to most J2EE apps?

    Thoughts Floyd?
    Reply to this Reply to original

  19. Comparison Matrix?[ Go to top ]

    Yeap!!! I support this idea. For example, when developing with Interbase, usually first driver you work with is Interclient, that in version 2.0, is very unstable. In contrast, JayBird pure JDBC driver, works like a charm. This matriz could help avoid killing many neurons while trying to work with some buggy software.

    Cheers


    Javier
    Reply to this Reply to original

  20. NetDirect JSQLConnect[ Go to top ]

    We've been using JSQLConnect from NetDirect for over 2 years now. Great speed, great support. The stuff just works. Tried Merant early on and had a whole bunch of issues (one being that they claimed to support SQL Server 2K, but the driver puked on bigint data types).

    http://www.j-netdirect.com
    Reply to this Reply to original