I think you've just discovered why there are people who's job title is "Database Administrator". MySQL and Postgresql are relatively easy to administer, but all the big commercial databases can get fairly involved, as you tune performance and try to get smoother backups (you can get fairly deep into the free ones, too).

I'm a developer and sysadmin who's gotten dragooned into being the DBA, and I have to say that DB2 is just as complex as the OS it runs on - only the defaults aren't as good. Having watched the DBA's at other places, and talked to people using other RDBMS's I'm pretty convinced that all the commercial ones are fairly rough in their own way.

As for having to tweak the OS, well, it seems to me that Un*xes tend to ship configured for people running lots of small programs, so you end up doing a bit of reconfiguring in order to run something big like an RDBMS. And the more you try to do with it, the more tweaking you need.

In reply to Re: Sysadmin Aspects of DBMS by edebill
in thread Sysadmin Aspects of DBMS by jlongino

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