Re: Oracle vs. Microsoft

Southside Schmitty wrote in message
<824qf6$g63$1_at_nnrp1.deja.com>...
|I work for a company that is caught in the Microsoft vs. Oracle
battle.

    [big snip]

|We have a development team testing some of these architectures
and
|they are having some issues with their prototypes...speed (ODBC)
and
|object issues (OLE DB) in the middle layer. With OLE DB they
were
|having problems with "seeing" contents of an Oracle package.
|
|Because of "issues" they are attempting to push us into using
SQL
|Server as a backend because it is too complex and cumbersome to
do the
|MS/Oracle thing. And, I don't think that it's a good idea to
have
|different database types for mission-critical, type 3
applications.
|I'm trying to gather some ammo to support my arguments.

If your development team isn't sharp enough to cope with the complexity of communicating with an Oracle database using Microsoft front end products what makes anyone think that they are sharp enough to design robust database applications using anything?

ODBC often tends to be slow in comparison to any of the other alternatives, but OLE -- if done properly -- can be quite fast. I have been at 4 sites in the last two years that used Microsoft front-end tools to talk to Oracle databases. Once they did some experimentation and learned what to avoid, e.g., bringing large datasets back to the client, they were all able to achieve satisfactory performance.

|Is SQL Server robust enough? As robust as Oracle? How does it
scale?
|For Oracle, the number of users that an NT box can support is
miniscule
|when compared to Oracle on a UNIX box.

Oracle is robust enough to run 24x7 in thousands of installations. I do not know if this is true of SQL Server. SQL Server doesn't scale as well as Oracle since it is limited to Intel chips. Your last statement is true, but it is also true that a large bus can carry more passengers than a passenger car -- so what.
|
|In theory, by putting the middle tier in there, one could argue
that it
|doesn't matter to an enterprise what the backend is because you
are
|always shielded by the middle tier. What happens when people
want to
|do data warehousing? If people are using a homogeneous
database, do
|they usually grab data directly out of the database? Or do they
use
|the business objects? Or do they crank data into text files and
run it
|into the warehouse?

All of the above. It depends on what is the easiest way to grab the data without disrupting transaction processing and where the data is being pulled from. For example, I just started a new assignment where the input to the data warehouse comes from a mix of flat files and Oracle RDBMS

|And, lastly (for now), how do things like this affect a data
center?
|DBA support, licensing, servers, database utilities like a
defragger,
|etc.?

Since SQL Server requires minimal DBA support DBA support shouldn't be an issue. If you are using both SQL Server and Oracle as compared to only Oracle it stands to reason that your license costs for the servers will be greater. If you design your Oracle database correctly you do not have to ever defrag it, can't speak for SQL Server.

|
|Thank,
|Tom Schmitt
|
|
|Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
|Before you buy.

hth
jerry gitomer Received on Thu Dec 02 1999 - 00:11:11 CST