We have been comparing Oracle RAC against the z/OS Db2.

I tend to see that there's a lot of bias for people, depending on, for example, if they work for an Oracle database management system. In that case, you tend to get a lot of people that are biased towards the Oracle. Likewise, you'll get that with Db2 LUW or Db2 z/OS. They don't tend to know what the other environment can do. That said, looking at it from an infrastructure and system programming background, as my background is really system programming and storage and hardware infrastructure, it's trying to get a general view on what the database management system can offer for SLAs, high availability when it's patched, and how often it would have to be patched. I want to know, for example, if there are a lot more security defects and fixes with one environment as opposed to another so that we're not interrupting our hosted business in the environment when we're doing our maintenance and new releases of software.

When you look at IBM Db2 Database, you feel it is more of a vendor lock-in type of approach. IBM Db2 Database offers little performance difference or competitive advantage compared to Oracle SQL or other platforms.

The products recommended to my customers may vary and depend on certain agreements. There are a lot of products, like Oracle, Microsoft SQL, and many other cloud databases, making for a wide portfolio of products.

There are multiple competitors like Oracle, but Db2 is the best for our use case.

There weren't a lot of choices for mainframes at the time.

We did look at other options and found them to be more reasonably priced. 

Database Hammer does not work with IBM Power or POWER8. It is too expensive for us to purchase POWER9 so we are migrating to AWS and comparing that to Azure. 

Currently, our server and database are shut down and not in use. 

As we have experience with a variety of database types any one of them could play into our architecture. I was hoping to have PaaS backup solution for the Db2 that we plan to deploy to Azure. But current plan is to back up the Db2 database to storage instead to some service in cloud. Doing it this way we would need to do a work-around and manage the backups by scripting and manage the retention and the sizes and disk drives. It is not optimal and it would be better if we could just send the backup to some kind of API or service in Azure and just configure it to back up images and files. In our testing, that is currently not working with Db2.  

I was looking for this kind of migration solution for the Db2 database, but I could not find it — which surprises me. I looked at the Tivoli Storage Manager, which supports the Db2 backups to the API, but they do not have that kind of PaaS service in Azure.

We evaluated Oracle, but the ease of application re-hosting with IBM DB2, as well as its comparable reliability and scalability tilted it in favor of IBM DB2 UDB.

We are currently in the process of migrating some of our models to the cloud, and we are looking for a cloud-based relational database.

Performance-wise, Oracle is the best solution. It is much more reliable. Regarding the end user administration and the functions available, SQL Server is much easier.

They have much more user-friendly interfaces. Regarding Db2, I'm a little bit in doubt. I don't see that it is significantly different when I went from SQL Server to Db2. I have not seen any significant improvements or changes.

I'm looking at other databases right now. I'd prefer something with a backup functionality, which Db2 lacks.

No, they were the incumbent.

We have changed to a new platform, so I am no longer using IBM DB2.

MS SQL Server 2014 and Oracle 12g.

No, I did not evaluate other options before choosing this product.

We did not evaluate other options from a TSM server point of view, as there was no other way. From other way, we evaluated Oracle, which is cheaper and there are more people with Oracle-experience.

As we already use Oracle and MS SQL for applications, I looked at the latest version of Oracle (at the time v9) to examine any differences pertinent to the last time I had looked at it.

MS SQL: I only briefly looked at it. IMHO, it was no match for DB2 or Oracle, as far as what I consider “Enterprise Databases” to be.

Yes. Oracle Database.

We considered Oracle. But, Oracle kept coming out with new versions and every time you had to change something in your application.