Re: Differences between Oracle RDBMS and MS SQL Server

In article <90mf5e$22r$1_at_nnrp1.deja.com>,   lindawie_at_my-deja.com wrote:
>
>
> Slick technical features are nice, but in the end they will not sway
 an
> informed management. Executives will base their purchase decisions on
> things like how much of the budget will this consume, how can they
> justify paying developers and DBAs twice as much as nontechnical
> people, or is it more cost-effective to just go to an application
> service provider.
>
> Linda
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.
>

Are you suggesting that it is cost is the only factor? Why not stick to paper and pencil? Are you suggesting that developers and DBAs are not productive and should be replaced by a 3rd party group ( of developers and DBAs )?

I have worked for companies that took Johnny who wanted to write code to develop the corporate database. And when it was small and did something your PDA did, things worked well. And the (pick you favorite RDBMS here) was cheap. Then the project was scaled up and features were added, and things stopped working. Not necessarily due to (pick you favorite RDBMS here) but to Johnny's design or lack of it. It took months to undo the damage.

IMHO one of Oracles major advantages is the developer/DBAs have to have some skill before they are hired. It slows down the "you start developing it while I get the specifications from the user" mode of development.

Similarly, it is hard to justify changing to or adding Oracle/SqlServer if all that you think you are doing is moving the old system to Oracle/SqlServer. The big cost is trying to figure out what it is that you are trying to do.

Also, I think the total cost of goods is a bit misleading. A car is much more expensive than walking especially with purchase, insurance, repairs, gas etc. However, do you want to incur the cost of walking? Your assertion that all these people and machines are expensive may mean that you have not reached the level of need that requires them. When you are using a couple of TBytes of data and running 24/7 and your still behind in getting things done, maybe the cost is less significant?

Good skilled people are expensive but productive. The real cost of high salaries is getting someone who is not skilled or as skilled as you are paying for. A rule of thumb is software development, a good programmer is 20X more productive than an average programmer. I have not seen a good programmer paid 20X her average programmer's salary.

However we stray.

Getting back to technical things:

Oracle runs on many platforms and OS's (NT, Unix, VMS), not just NT. This means that Oracle will scale from a desktop to department server to company-wide server to a multiple server environment.

Oracles triggers are much more developed ( statement level, row level, before and after ).

SQLServer 7.0 (and 2000?) has fixed extents of 8 pages ( 128 extents per 1 Megabyte ) as opposed to the variable extents allowed in Oracle. Minimum extent is the size of a block. There are multiple methods for allowing extents to grow including init extent and next extents.

SQLServer 7.0 does not have the concept of free space within a block. It appears to have free space as one can add and subtract columns. However, at some point you cannot add more space. Oracle has the same concept except the control is in the user's hands.

A row is restricted to 8K in SQLServer ( expect for text, ntext fields) and is limited in Oracle to the block size which is configurable.

Oh yeah, I found at least one use of bitwise operators in SQLServer. The triggers allow the comparison of column that are update via the operator. Oracle requires that you write out each variable.

--
Michael Krolewski
Rosetta Inpharmatics
mkrolewski_at_rosetta.org
              Ususual disclaimers


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Before you buy.