Re: ms-sql vs oracle on NT or UNIX?

Joel Garry wrote in message <6bvk58$485$1_at_pebble.ml.org>...
>
>While I agree that it is much better to avoid a religious war, I have spent
>a great deal of time with both on my desk, and have to agree with Fredrik.
>NT lacks basic tools for working as a server - it was not designed as a
>server, but merely positioned as one when it was greeted with a big yawn
>by the vast majority of 3.1 users who saw no reason to upgrade.

Agreed, I have had my fill with these o/s wars. But I have seen NT being used as a corporate database platform and the majority of the problem experienced is/was with the database and not the operating system. A properly configured operating system, be it NT, UNIX or Novell, will deliver within the capabilities of the hardware. On the administration side, NT is the easiest to administer and Unix the most difficult. My view point has always been that NT is an ideal platform for small to medium servers, and Unix for medium to large servers.

Simple example. I would hate to support a customer that runs a video shop using a Unix backend - I shudder to think what they may inadvertently do it (ever tried to recover a Unix file system after it was totally stuffed because they simply turn of the power switch at the end of every day?). OTOH, I would not like to touch a 50+ GB database on NT either.

The fact is that both operating systems are being used, and used very successfully, in many corporate environments for a variety of things. Simply knocking one because of a personal dislike is naive in my point of view. I love Oracle, but that does not say I should hate SQL-Server or Informix. Sure there are fatures in Unix that you don't have in NT (I would kill for a more Unix-like command/scripting language in NT). And vice versa. But both operating systems is part of the server environment for Oracle.

To answer a posting asking for technical considerations regarding SQL-Server vs. Oracle with an answer NT-sucks-because-I-don't-like-it is a bit pathetic IMO. As a side note : a thing that I would like to see discussed on usenet is running OPS on NT clusters vs Unix MPP. NT scalability has always been questioned. Is NT clusters the answer? And how does it compare to MPP technically and with price/performance?

regards,
Billy Received on Fri Feb 13 1998 - 00:00:00 CST