Re: Oracle Vs. SQL Server on NT

Malcolm:

I have no intention of misleading people. Every word of what I wrote is true and you and I both have the right to express ourselves. Always leads to
a healthy discussion !

Since we are discussing things objectively:

1. Oracle licenses per concurrent user (it means that any number of people) could use the server as long they do not exceed the total number of licenses. There is no need of a client access license. I can bet my hat that when SQL Server becomes popular, especially with 7.0 the prices will increase. You cannot expect MS to charge $100 for a database license, when just MS-Word is over $150 bucks.
2. You are very right, that for a 5 GB DB, you do not need SQL Server Enterprise.
3. You will have to agree that row level locking is superior and offers far better control of data manipulation, e.g. no need for temporary tables, etc. Oracle, Informix and DB2 have it. Sybase still does not have it (maybe 11.5 has it). SQL Server 7.0 has row level locking and I am glad it does. For most IS shops, like the shops I work in, row-level locking is a standard. Try developing an application with row-level locking, you will never want to go back to page-level locking. Oracle, Informix and DB2 give you row-level locking for inserts/update/delete - i.e. all DML. This is the main reason why most OLTP ERP applications such as SAP, BAAN do not run on SQL Server 6.5.
4. I did not have a great experience with MS's support. Maybe because we were never too serious with it. Of course, in my shop , we run about 15 instances of Oracle on UNIX servers. We have gone all the way upto 30 instances, however for redundancy purposes, we do not exceed 15 instances per server. (of course, they cost a lot more,but support costs are low on UNIX).
5. Actually what I meant what was that Oracle is not hard to install. SQL Server IS KNOWN as a easy to configure and install database and which one does not required a very skilled DBA to administer.
6. In our world, we pay a lot of value to scalability. SQL server fails miserably in our testing, mainly because it runs on NT only. We use NT server a lot right now, but only for print and file serving, mail (exchange) and data-warehousing.

Good luck,

Raman Batra

Malcolm Blackhall wrote:
>
> You obviously don't have much experience with Microsoft SQL Server. I suggest
> you refrain from making comments about it, and misleading people trying to do
> their job, until you do.
>
> How is $300 per concurrent user a bargain when you can buy SQL Server Client
> Access Licenses for about $100 in quantity?
>
> You don't need SQL Server Enterprise for a 5 GB database.
>
> Microsoft offers excellent technical support, i.e. Premier Support. Their SQL
> Server group has provided excellent support for me in the past including staying
> right on the phone with me as long as it took to get a production system backup
> up after a hardware failure.
>
> Page level locking is not an issue in all but a few cases if the database is
> properly designed in the first place. Using clustered indexes appropriately can
> solve most contention problems. SQL Server 6.5 does support page level locking
> on inserts if you want to use it.
>
> I have about 20 quad-processor SQL Server systems running under NT. They don't
> have to be rebooted much at all.
>
> SQL Server installation is no more difficult than Oracle, just take the defaults
> if you don't care. Of course, some of the questions it asks you might actually
> be relevant to configuring your system, like what kind of network support you
> want. SQL Server also has an excellent administration tool called Enterprise
> Manager.
Received on Sun Mar 22 1998 - 00:00:00 CST