Re: Oracle vs. Sybase

Bryan Warfield wrote:

> Ken Eaton wrote:
> >
> > A. S. Williams wrote:
> > We recently went through the same analysis. We had a major
 application
> > based on Sybase and some in-house Oracle databases. Oracle came out
 the
> > winner with the key differences being:
> > 1) Financial stability of Sybase as a company is
 questionable.
> > Sybase had five quarters of losing money when we did our
> > evaluation.

Right now, Oracle owns about 31 or 39 % of RDMS market. Only company that is a threat to Oracle is Microsoft with Sybase and Informix suffering from financial problems. MS owns 1% of Enterprise RDMS market. Sybase wrote or is writing SQL 6.0, 65 and also 7.0 with row locking and everything. If not, it is very much similar, if not identical. Unless MS spends billions of dollar rewriting entire SQL server, MS SQL server will have Sybase in its core codes. Now let's assume that Sybase financial problems get worse and cannot recover. My feeling is MS will buy out the company. It is unlikely to happen any time soon but very possible.
So if Sybase runs out of business, I migrate to MS Enterprise SQL server.

> > 2) Broader base of products available that work with it.
 i.e.
> > We were looking to buy a Financial package and Sybase was
 

> > more limiting than Oracle.

Funny, you pick financial package. Many banks and financial institutes on Wall Street use Sybase to run their business.

> > 3) More consulting expertise available with Oracle...
>

Because it has bigger share of market and been around for longer than Sybase.Present market share doesn't mean much when the company will compete against MS.

> > 4) Questions about the QC process for Sybase that would
 allow
> > version 10 out with major bugs that caused us a lot of
> > heartache... Oracle isn't perfect, but appears to release
 

> > cleaner products than Sybase. Version 11 from Sybase
 looks
> > good though...

When I reported a problem with development SQL server v 10, we got EBF next day or a couple of days. Make sure you got stable environment before go general available. Then you are O.K.

> > FWIW... Sybase is less DBA intensive than Oracle. It is easier to
 tune
> > and manage. They also have good gateway and replication features.
 Their
> > prices are lower than Oracle's although the gap is closing. There
 were a
> > number of other things we looked at, but they didn't lean heavily
 one
> > way or the other.

One of fortune 50 companies evaluates Informix, Oracle and Sybase on Unix platform in every aspects from its performance to company financial status a year ago.Informix came out on top, Sybase second and Oracle third.
IMO, may companies deciding on Oracle are making strategic moves these days.

> I've used Sybase 10 & 4.9, but not 11. I prefer Oracle to Sybase.
> The
> Oracle redo log architecture is superior to the single log used in
> Sybase. It seems that the Sybase log always fills and requires 'dump
> tran with nolog' regardless of how large you make it (at least in
> transaction-intensive environments). Very annoying.

Make log big enough so that with threshold manager, it can truncate itself before running out of it.

> Also, Oracle's
> row-level locking really is better than page-level locking, preventing
>
> most concurrency problems. I agree that Sybase is less DBA-intensive,
>

Coming near you pretty soon.

> however, and that's because it's less tunable (i.e., far less control
> over the database is possible with Sybase, it simply doesn't have
> dozens
> of setable parameters & options available). If you don't mind this,
> then Sybase is okay.

Sybase 11 has tons of parameters to play with.

> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Bryan Warfield
> Certified Oracle DBA Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
> voice: 214-922-5873 E-mail: Bryan.Warfield_at_DAL.frb.org

--
Jay Lee   Lake Mary, FL