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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: ORACLE VS. SYBASE
Hmm, quite a bit of this is factually incorrect, and may be based on a comparison between the latest Sybase and an older Oracle.
Firstly, yes, Oracle is way more expensive than Sybase. Funnily enough, this means that Oracle Corporation are financially rock-solid, and Sybase are on the verge of collapse. A database is for life, not just for Christmas.
Oracle tech support is at least as good as Sybase's, but that depends on the level of support you are willing to pay for. I once worked for a client who reported a bug and had a new build of Oracle delivered to them on a gold CD the next morning. Oracle does have online case management and updating, via MetaLink.
Sybase cheaper to administer? Yes, you just need to hire someone to run "dbcc" every couple of hours :0) You have to compare like with like: one man can row a boat across a lake, but the USS Nimitz has a crew of 6000. And if you want one text file containing hundreds of options, well we have init.ora for that. A Sybase database is not the same thing as an Oracle database, it's more like a schema, with a Sybase server being like an instance. There's one user database per server, and users are assigned to databases, just like the way we grant roles to users. This may make administration easier, but it also means you can't have multiple database instances tuned for different applications on the same hardware.
The fact that Sybase runs threaded and Oracle runs as processes is neither here nor there. And Sybase manages memory "better", what does that mean? Quicker, uses less, can handle more, what?
I don't understand the point about Oracle not cleaning up its temporary segments, of course it does. And Sybase shares its tempdb between all databases on the machine, whereas Oracle has one per instance. again making tuning and segregation of different applications impossible.
Far better documentation? Yes, Sybooks was good in its day, but MetaLink/TechNet have caught up now.
I guess it's a good thing that it's easy to unload data from Sybase, in the same way that it's easy to dump a CSV file from MS Access.
The comment on disaster recovery is utter rubbish, of course Oracle can be backed up while fully online and handling transactions. You can use export, hot backup or RMAN. Oracle has powerful replication also, or you can use dblinks and AQs to move data back and forth between instances under programmatic control. Sybase can't. And later on backups, Oracle has a range of options for backups, RMAN, Legato, hotbackup, whatever. And, of course, there's no equivalent of "dbcc" in Oracle, we don't need it, since datablock corruption is not a daily occurrence for us...
Sybase still does have a good presence in financial services, but that's mainly a legacy thing, lots of T-SQL already written, just like there's lots of COBOL already written. This is something to boast about? I think not.
T-SQL is a pretty limited language for stored procedures, it cannot compare to PL/SQL. Every SELECT in Oracle is an implicit cursor, true, but that's because Oracle knows how to run cursors efficiently. Sybase never could, this is why Sybase programmers never use cursors, not because they're inherently a bad idea.
We are multi-threaded, it's called MTS. Next he'll be claiming that Oracle can only take one connected client at a time!
And finally, the killer: Sybase is similar to MSSQL. Enough said!
That's about all I can be bothered to type for now. In summary, I would like to say that Sybase is a fine product for your grandmother to store her recipes in :0)
g
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2001 10:15 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
See below a mail I received from Sybase oriented person :) Please argue
it maybe very interesting (original mail was Sybase vs Oracle:Why to go
to Sybase?)
/Maya
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