Re: Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server

In article <01bc7ca7$bf855420$e6118fa5_at_govert>, Govert van Drimmelen <govert_at_icon.co.za> writes

>1. If your platform policy is Microsoft directed, and NT is a choice
>available to you, go for MS SQL Server. NT is a good platform getting
>stronger very quickly. MS SQL Server rides on the back of the OS to a
>large extent.

You're only talking about the 2 RBMDS vendors, presumably?

If you want a really fully featured and reliable RDBMS for NT then consider DB2. The current version, 2.1, was a major re-write done with NT partly in mind (but also UNIX and OS/2), and independent research, such as the Bloor report, indicates it is more powerful, scalable and robust than SQL Server.

Version 5 (big jump!), now in late beta, has a greatly extended GUI, and incorporates the parallel edition features (previously a separate UNIXonly  version of DB2). This has been reported (I can't remember where) to even better SQL Server in the area of ease-of-use - traditionally not a DB2 strength.

If I was a large company choosing a database for NT, DB2 would seem a natural choice to run along DB2 on my mainframe. This would be a more important factor than integration with my UNIX database (typically Oracle), since the mainframe database would normally host my corporate reference data, and many of the systems that typically feed MIS databases on UNIX and NT. If NT started to replace UNIX in time, I would then be left with a single database on both platforms.

I suspect smaller companies, probably currently using Oracle on UNIX, will be a harder battle to win. But *if* UNIX does start falling to NT, Oracle's position could be weakened, and then the board will have opened up, so who knows?

-- 
Jeremy Rickard