Differences between DB2 and Oracle [closed]

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We had a talk with colleagues about databases yesterday as we will have a DB2 education in few weeks. I'm wondering, what are the differen开发者_运维技巧ces between DB2 and Oracle as two major enterprise solutions? Are there any limitations in comparison to each other? Are there any tasks more suitable for DB2 or Oracle?

(I found this article, but I somehow doubt it covers everything)

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The major difference in my eyes is that DB2 can tell the difference between a NULL and an empty string :-)

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IMMSMW, an extremely important difference between the two is the way they achieve transaction isolation. Oracle uses MVCC, DB2 uses traditional two-phase locking.

But that might have changed in recent DB2 releases, of course.

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With the release of db2 9.7 last year there are fewer differences that there every were DB2 has licensed Postgress plus and this is in DB2 9.7. This is being used essentially a set of Oracle compatibility features. One of those features is Concurrency control. The other main ones are SQL dialect, PL/SQL, PL/SQL packages Built-in packages, JDBC client with extensions, OCI client applications, SQL*Plus scripts. More details here http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/techarticle/dm-0907oracleappsondb2/

I should disclose that I work for IBM now a migration specialist.

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Oracle table, schema and column names are still limited to 30 characters, which can get annoying.

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From which point of view?

For developers that stick to some standard, the differences should not be notable. For admins, yes, that's another story.