Re: Oracle v. MS SQL Server ?

>Subject: Oracle v. MS SQL Server ?
>From: jamesbri4_at_aol.com (JamesBri4)
>Date: 10/2/98 1:41 PM Central Daylight Time
>Message-id: <19981002144157.25965.00005447_at_ng38.aol.com>
>
>
>What is the better database Oracle v. MS SQL Server?
>I've had proponnents of both try to sell me on their product, what's your
>opinion?
>Which one has the better features?
>
>PS. I am posting the same question on the MS SQL Server to equalize the
>results
>

Like some of the answers to similar questions that I have seen, it really dependes on what type of applications you are going to develop.

For mission critical, high performance and high availability applications I wouldn't use NT. So MS SQL Server is automatically out of the picture. NT, as of version 4.0 sp 3, is still not robust enough to ensure 24x7 operations. It's essentially a single user operating system which makes it difficult to manage. Sometimes the only way to resolve problems is to reboot the OS.

If your application doesn't not have many concurrent users and you can afford some down time, then SQL Server can be a good choice because it's so much more inexpensive, and a lot easier to manage. On the other hand, you can make Oracle run very well because you have many tuning options. SQL Server does a lot things such as space allocation for you automatically, so it does not require a lot of DBA work. If you decide to go with SQL Server, I would wait until version 7 is out. As of version 6.5, the performance is not very good and the optimizer is not smart enough. SQL Server 7 uses row level locking. This should eliminate some of the problems that come with page level locking. One of the things I don't like about SQL Server is how it handles the transaction logs. Open transactions can cause the log to fill up and stop the entire system.

I have seen many organizations picking SQL Server over Oracle because the management wants to make sure the RDBMS they chose will be supported 10 years later and, granted, SQL Server is becoming a better platform for low end applications. But for high end applications Oracle is still far better today, and probably will be for a long time. Received on Sun Oct 04 1998 - 12:20:24 CDT