Since the fund-administration application was about to undergo a substantial rewrite, State Street figured it was a good time to move to IBM's DB2 for added scale and functionality. Shifting to Linux rather than Unix allowed the company to reuse some of its Intel-based hardware, at least on the development side, Saul says. Plus, State Street had performance and operational tools for its DB2 environment. Those types of tools "really weren't there at the time for SQL Server," says Saul. They're also lagging for Linux, but since the fund-administration application isn't transactional, those were less significant issues, he says.

"Given the business we're in, we do a lot of monitoring and auditing. From a security point of view, we make sure that people have appropriate access to the database and the operating system. So we bought and built a lot over time to do that," says Saul.

State Street gave Microsoft plenty of opportunity to keep Windows in the running, according to Saul. Microsoft even put on a workshop to show how the application could be redesigned to scale better. But the database ultimately became the critical factor in the decision, and the financial firm sided with IBM and its "class of the industry" DB2 optimizer, he says. Microsoft's upgrade to SQL Server 2000 was still in the works at the time.

"In our view, in this application, DB2 was a better choice as far as the scaling and the capabilities. It's a bit more forgiving because of its optimizer. When it develops its database plan to do its join, it does a better job than SQL Server," says Saul, although he does note that performance can vary by application based on how well the developer writes to SQL Server.

State Street rewrote the fund administration application in Java and redesigned the database, saving only the basic process flow of the original application. The rebuilt application went into production nearly a year ago.