dbd33

Canadian IT contractors do work in the same way as they do in the UK (i.e. Limited Company, third party service company acting through an agency, etc...).

Usually they have one or more numbered companies, that is, as the firm's just for tax and employment law fiddles, it has no name only the next number. Truckers often do the same thing, look at the cab door and you'll see, for example, "Khalistan Trucking - A Division of nnnnnnnnn Ont. Inc."

I don't think there are any computers to speak of in NB so any contracting there would have to be outsourced from somewhere else.

JezHarper

Sounds like there is an opportunity to introduce technology to businesses in NB. Get them to move away from their archaic manual processing that works perfectly adequately into a technological solution which doesn't work as well, forces people out of jobs, and costs the business 10 times as much to operate.

NB Here I come

steve of 5-0

Hi Andrew Miller,

I with my wife did commit before getting the `nod` from Fredericton, with the idea that if we were unsuccessful, we would have lost a little financially and moved on - we might have tried SK from a different angle, before returning to the UK.
[Of course we would not have even tried it if we had children with us, as their education issues could not have been sustained whilst we were on the course we took in NB.]

Still all in the past now, we have completed all aspects now and are very happy.

dbd33

You assume that there are businesses in NB.

JezHarper

Yes, I'm still not willing to agree with 'Canada = Toronto + Vast Empty Wilderness'

dbd33

I don't say quite that but :

- NB is pretty empty, some logging, pulp and paper, some tourism and fishing. None of that's particularly in need of computerising. Nice looking place, a couple I know from this block moved down there and did very well from the deal, but he was able to keep his job "here" and work remotely.

- Based on DB2/UDB licences, the GTA, Ottawa, SW Ontario and Quebec City have significant numbers of commercial computers. The rest of Canada does not, though there must be some in Calgary and Vancouver, maybe they're all Oracle. I also know of a few Oracle shops in Montreal.

I don't think contracting in NB is a viable option unless you're willing to be constantly on the road. Having said that, I do know two contractors who worked there for six months each, at McCain's. One's a Japanese-Canadian, he said people looked at him as if he'd fallen from Mars and he was often asked if he was "one of those native people". The other one's a Newf so he was ready for NB.

JezHarper

hahahaha, fantastic Perhaps Oracle, Sybase, Sql Server have more of a market share than IBM. Perhaps the fact that Toronto has a large financial development sector has an impact on the type of back end DB that is used.

dbd33

Why is that funny? Sybase is obsolete. SQL Server is only for small systems. UDB and Oracle dominate the commercial DBMS business so, while there are regional and industry preferences, if a region has no significant number of licenses for either, it has no commercial computer sector to speak of. I have the numbers for UDB here, at home, but not the Oracle ones so I used UDB.

Note that, for there to be a market for a contractor, there should be a significant number of shops and a shortage of the skills offered by the contractor. Ottawa is such a market. NB is not.

JezHarper

Its funny because your argument is based on a single product which has rooted itself in a particular market. It cannot compete with the likes of SQL Server, or even Oracle for scalable client server distributed systems.

For there to be a market for a contractor, there should be a requirement for the contractor's skills, there doesn't need to be a significant number of shops (i presume you mean software houses). There doesn't need to be a shortage of skills, there needs to be a requirement for a short term worker.

I think we may be arguing from different perspectives. I am a software developer (C++, Java, C#, ASP.NET), not a DBA. I have no intention of ever touching CoBOL again, and most of my development is done on the GUI and Business layer tiers, whenever I have done any DB development, it has been on Oracle and SQL Server.

dbd33

I'm a pimp. I buy and sell computer contractors and software. I've been doing so for twenty years. Before that I was a contractor. Total experience in contracting in Canada twenty-five years. In that time I have heard of the two guys working in NB short term at a firm that has since outsourced. That's it. There is no work in NB.

UDB is a widely used DBMS for commercial applications of various sizes, more so in North America than in Europe, thus I thought it a useful example. I suppose one could just as well look at the number of licenses for each type of Unix but I'm not that interested, Southern Mississauga is a better market.

What there is in NB is call centre work. If you insist on trying to be a computer contractor down there make sure your French is good; bilingual phone people get paid more.

dbd33

Oh, and SQL Server doesn't scale well. If you need to have large tables your choices are Oracle or UDB which are about equal in capability (UDB is usually cheaper) or Teradata. If you can use SQL Server for an application you could consider MySQL which has two advantages over SQL Server; stability and cost.

Here are examples of large databases :

http://www.wintercorp.com/vldb/2003_...TenWinners.asp

lots of Oracle and DB2/UDB.