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

Sorry Sarah for all the political types in this group. Unix guys like unix, NT folk like NT, VMS hates them both, and mainframes think they are ALL toys.

Hopefully this will help with your orginal question.

We run about 2000 tables, 30 MB of stored procedures, numerous views, triggers, and indexes. This database is a commercial application used for Accounting purposes ( competes with Peoplesoft and Oracle Financials).

We support Sybase, Oracle, MS SqlServer, and Centura SQLBase. Our preference is Oracle as it handles concurrancy issues much better than any of the others. It and Sybase are also supported on many different hardware platforms. This means you can throw more expensive hardware at the problem if warrented.

MS Sqlserver is probalby our least favorite database. We have alot of troubel with it crashing and doing other strange things. This may be because we have less experience with it then any of the others but be that as it may, we never had the same problems when first learning to deal with Oracle or Sybase. Sybase is sortof MS SqlServer's daddy. If you are considering either Oracle or MS Sqlserver, I might ask that you change your comparision to Oracle or Sybase. Sybase seems much more stable to me.

For info on Oracle and NT/UNIX, read further.

Our app runs fine with Oracle on NT with up to 50 concurrent users. Of course you need multiple pentium pros and generally about 256K memory ( more the better) and a fast disk subsystem but in general, I have found that a dual PentiumPro 200 with 1 MB on boardcache and a fast raid5 controller with onboard battery backedup cache is roughly equivilant to an HP9000 K100 Unix box. A little faster processing but slower disk io.

My opinion on NT/UNIX is to use UNIX on a risc box when possible but if there are constraints, NT is a good but not great server. The price for hardware is much cheaper but the OS is also less stable. I generally tell folk to reboot thier server once a week at a minimum as NT 'gets tired'. Unix folk go ballistic at that. I dont care. They didnt write either one of the operating systems. Just a bunch of guys typing keystrokes. Rebooting once in a while does not generally cause any business repurcusions. May not be elegant but is cheap and works.

For critical apps that need 24x7, Use unix on HP,SUN,DEC....and still expect Oracle to crash periodically if anything wierd happens. For any other app, compare NT. Once you get past the evangelists you often find a favorable cost/benefit ratio.

Hope this helps.

clay
clay_at_his.com

Sarah Sikes wrote in message <34e38ab7.2816289_at_news.erols.com>...
>"Joaquin Ruiseco" <jruiseco_at_msn.com> wrote:
>
>>I just have a performance question. How does the performance of ms-SQL
>>compare to Oracle on NT and what about on UNIX? Which system would you
>>recommend and why? I just want to hear pros and cons of oracle
Received on Sun Feb 15 1998 - 00:00:00 CST