Re: Differences between Oracle RDBMS and MS SQL Server

In our last gripping episode tdkannel_at_bitstream.net (Tim Kannel) wrote:
> > As an Oracle developer writing SQL Server, I have come across
 numerous
> > points where SQL Server's SQL cannot perform the task...
>
> Just the opposite for me...
>
> - Oracle's handling of date/time strings is much less flexible than
> SQL server

Yes, SQLServer can generate 100's of a second time slices, however I have yet to work on an application involving Oracle where that was a show-stopper. And, with 8 and 8i, EXTPROC provides the ability to call external Java and C/C++ library routines to calculate time to that granularity.

> - Oracle has too many stupid restrictions, like 30-character
identifiers

Why in the world would you want a 100-character table or column name? 30 characters are more than sufficient. I, for one, wouldn't want to write code for an application where the tables had more than 30 character names and the columns followed suit.

> - AFAIK, Oracle has no equivalent to SQL server's "top n" in select
 clause
> (rownum comparisons don't count)

And why don't ROWNUM comparisons count? It is a fairly efficient method to generate "top-N" queries. I would imagine that some similar internal "gyrations" are being utilized by SQLServer to compute those "top-N" queries.

> - Oracle doesn't have bitwise operations like SQL server
> - Oracle doesn't support "x=y" column aliasing ("y as x" is harder
> to read, IMO)
>

To me, AS makes much more sense. "x=y" implies comparison, not assignment as far as column aliases are concerned.

> P.S. any corrections or suggestions about what I said above would
> be appreciated.
>
> --
> Tim Kannel
> TCAP 3.1 - Captures console I/O to a file
> ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/msdos/sysutl/tcap31.zip
>

--
David Fitzjarrell
Oracle Certified DBA


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