Oracle vs. Microsoft

From: Southside Schmitty <schmittt5892_at_my-deja.com>
Date: Thu, 02 Dec 1999 03:53:11 GMT
Message-ID: <824qf6$g63$1@nnrp1.deja.com>

I work for a company that is caught in the Microsoft vs. Oracle battle.

We have a few of the Oracle Financial Applications up and flying (AP, AR, GL, PO/INV). We will probably be adding the Manufacturing suite, Order Entry, Oracle Project Accounting, and a few others in the next 3-5 years. When we made the commitment to the Applications, we also decided to commit to the Oracle database itself. We used to be an Ingres house. In doing so, we have another mission-critical, client/server application bumping up against an Oracle backend. These databases are running on a Unix DEC Alpha server.

We also have group that has developed an intranet infrastructure using Microsoft technologies. They have a standard portal into life at my company which is the entry point so that our employees can get to electronic forms, look up someone's phone number/location, and also get to web sites developed by other business units. They have also developed workgroup applets for several departments. Each of these efforts employ MS developed ASPs bumping up against an SQL Server database. They have relied on all Microsoft products for their infrastructure...NT 4.0 web servers, application servers, proxy servers, firewalls, etc.

One of my goals is to document the standard architecture for the new millennium. We have divided up applications into three bins.

1. Standalone (non-integrated), single user apps
2. Standalone, multi-user apps
3. Integrated, multi-user apps

My main concern is with apps that are number 3's.

We have made a determination to move away from a two-tier approach for them toward a multi-tier. This would involve having: 1. user objects responsible for presenting information to the users 2. a middle tier of business objects responsible for business rules and for interfacing with the database objects...no user objects will access the database directly
3. database objects responsible for all SELECTs, INSERTs, UPDATEs, and DELETEs on the database.

All database access, whether internal to the application or for other applications wanting to share data, will be done through the business objects. We thought that we would use Microsoft tools for the top two layers...using ASPs for the user objects and use VB/VC++ COM objects in the middle tier. We are still planning on using Oracle as the backend. We probably are going to use XML or ADO to communicate data between the user objects (or other applications) and the business objects. In the Oracle database, we plan on having PL/SQL stored procedures (stored in packages) that will receive request from the business objects and return/accept the data in arrays.

Have anyone used this architecture in any of your experience? Do you see many people doing MS/Oracle? If so, how are other people communicating between MS front ends and Oracle back ends? Are people using ODBC, OLE DB, or Oracle Objects for OLE?

We have a development team testing some of these architectures and they are having some issues with their prototypes...speed (ODBC) and object issues (OLE DB) in the middle layer. With OLE DB they were having problems with "seeing" contents of an Oracle package.

Because of "issues" they are attempting to push us into using SQL Server as a backend because it is too complex and cumbersome to do the MS/Oracle thing. And, I don't think that it's a good idea to have different database types for mission-critical, type 3 applications. I'm trying to gather some ammo to support my arguments.

Is SQL Server robust enough? As robust as Oracle? How does it scale? For Oracle, the number of users that an NT box can support is miniscule when compared to Oracle on a UNIX box.

In theory, by putting the middle tier in there, one could argue that it doesn't matter to an enterprise what the backend is because you are always shielded by the middle tier. What happens when people want to do data warehousing? If people are using a homogeneous database, do they usually grab data directly out of the database? Or do they use the business objects? Or do they crank data into text files and run it into the warehouse?

And, lastly (for now), how do things like this affect a data center? DBA support, licensing, servers, database utilities like a defragger, etc.?

Thank,
Tom Schmitt

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Before you buy. Received on Wed Dec 01 1999 - 21:53:11 CST