I am coming into this a little late, so forgive me if I repeat anything that
has already been said.

One of the first things that comes to my mind regarding a commercially
available third-party database is the licensing issues.  If it were DB2,
that wouldn't be too tricky for Tivoli, I suppose, but would likely increase
the price of TSM.

Also, the database is relatively low maintenance.  Introduction of a
commercial RDB (Relational Database) would also bring the headaches that are
associated with maintaining such a database; which is why DBA's do so well.
:)

Just a few thoughts.

Personally, I am very pleased by performance that can be achieved with TSM's
DB.  The factor that affects this is volume sizes and how many physical
disks are they spread across.  Plus, I/O available to those disks.

I have experimented with different approaches and noticed very different
results.  But, when I have found the good configurations, the performance
was impressive.


Regards,

Nate Norrgard