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WATCOM INTERNATIONAL Corp.'s Watcom SQL Server 4.0 for NetWare is a product well suited for departmental applications, but it's not ready for the big leagues. We regard it as a good migration stop on the road from XBase to relational databases.
It's hard to picture Watcom playing a major role in a large corporation, where competitors such as Oracle Corp. and Microsoft Corp., which offer databases that run on NetWare and Windows NT, respectively, have better performance numbers when handling large data sets. Watcom's ideal target is the small-company market or small department within a larger organization.
With the recent acquisition of Powersoft Corp., Watcom's parent company, by Sybase Inc., you have a dear migration path if you want to move up from Watcom to an enterprise-class relational database.
We scored Watcom using the same test plan we applied to Oracle 7.0.16 and Microsoft SQL Server for Windows NT, Version 4.21A (see Nov. 14, 1994, page 128). This included an on-line transaction processing (OLTP) test, decision-support queries, and bulk data loading. We looked at other areas that affect operational costs, such as administration, programming tools, back-up and recovery and data migration.
For our testing we used a Hewlett-Packard Co. NetServer with a 90-MHz Pentium processor, 64MB of RAM, and 5.6 gigabytes of hard disk space. Our 50 clients for the OLTP test were a mix of 386 and 486 machines running MS-DOS.
We based our benchmark code on the same specification and entity-relationship diagram describing an order-entry system for the fictional IW Auto Parts Supply Co. that we used in the Nov. 14 comparison.
FEATURES
The most significant new feature of Version 4.0 is the addition of stored procedures and triggers, as well as cascading updates and deletes. Watcom added TCP/IP support to its previous NetBIOS communications protocol.
You can connect to more than one Watcom SQL database at a time through its dynamic multiple database support. In addition, the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) drivers that give you access to files in other database formats were upgraded to Version 2. The query optimizer now has access to persistent statistics about your application, so that if the engine goes down the statistics are available on rebooting.
In general, the standard features of Watcom SQL Server...