Re: Oracle8i vs. SQL Server 2000

Neil Pike wrote:
>
> Rick,
>

        Thanks for jumping in Neil. I meant to address some of these issues also.

> Please cite specific examples if you can, or tell us who has given you this information.
> Everything you have written is completely wrong.
>
> > Also there were major concerns over the last release's ability to support > 50 concurrent
 users.
> > This to my knowledge has not been addressed.
>
> Que? I (and most SQL Server customers) have been running *many* more users than this on 1.1,
> 4.x, 6.x, 7.0 and 2000. Exactly who had these major concerns?
>

        We routinely have over 50 concurrent connections (many using the same user id, but from different sources) w/o a problem. In fact, we expect to scale one server up to 400+ concurrent connections without much trouble.

> > Also you will want to consider that SQLServer has NEVER been 7 X 24 unless you forgo good >
> backups.
>
> Untrue. SQL Server has always been able to be backed up whilst running (and these backups
> restore just fine). The performance of SQL Server was degraded quite a bit when doing this with
> v6.5 and below, but the degradation is minimal with 7.0 and 2000. (It's impossible to backup a
> database without affecting performance).
>

        Actually, that's not entirely true. With triple mirrored disks you can do it (and SQL 2000 will support "serverless" (I think that's what they are calling it) backups. Of course I'm sure you knew that. :-)

> > You cannot now nor have you been able to run a recoverable backup on this product
> > without running DBCC in single user mode. This is a carryover from when
> > Microsoft purchased SQLServer from Sybase.
>
> Again, not true and never has been. DBCC's have no effect on backups or recovery. What is true
> is that with earlier versions of SQL Server you could not 100% trust the results of a DBCC if the
> database was experiencing updates whilst you were dbcc'ing it. i.e. it was possible for a
> corruption to be reported that wasn't really there - if you then wanted to determine 100% that
> there was a corruption you would put the server in single-user mode and re-run it.
>
> (But this has nothing whatsoever to do with backup or recovery)
>

        I'd argue slightly here. It is good policy to run a DBCC before backups to ensure the validity of your database. Having said that, we often run DBCC's against our db's in production w/o problems. (Only when you want to do repairs do you have to actually have to go into single-user mode.)

> > For your sake make them aware of what this option limits the company to. If
> > I were you I would refuse to support it and look for another job. If you are
> > an Oracle DBA that should not be a problem.
>
> Maybe you should find out more about a product before slagging it off. Note I've said nothing
> bad about Oracle - it is a good product, as are most of the other major dbms's. They'll all do a
> good job.
>

        Oracle definitely has some real nice features. There are some very good reasons that that it has the market it does. And yes, I'd say that 6.5 had some good sized shortcomings compared to Oracle. 7.0 has removed almost all of those shortcomings. I'd say based on my limited experience, that I'd trust (and in fact will ) 2000 to do anything I throw at it.

        If I'm forced to convert from SQL 7.0/2000, I think Oracle would be 3rd on my list, after DB2.

> Neil Pike MVP/MCSE. Protech Computing Ltd
> Reply here - no email
> SQL FAQ (484 entries) see
> forumsb.compuserve.com/gvforums/UK/default.asp?SRV=MSDevApps (faqrtf.zip - L7 - SQL Public)
> or http://www.ntfaq.com/Section.cfm?sectionID=34
> or www.sqlserverfaq.com
> or www.mssqlserver.com/faq
Received on Sun Aug 20 2000 - 21:06:59 CDT