Re: Differences between Oracle RDBMS and MS SQL Server

> > - 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.

Try dbms_utility.get_time which returns milliseconds resolution. Great for performance measurements.

> > - 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.

I dont think 30 char length limits is a problem. I used to write assembler code where lenght was limited to 8 chars. That was a bitch. Maybe Oracle changes this, but I really dont care. I wont use names that long since I have to type them.

> > - 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.

In Oracle 8.1 you can perform an ordered subquery and select the first n rows in the outer query, effectively performing a top n query. And the qurery is smart, if there is an index on the field then only an index range scan will be perfomed.
like:

    select * from (select id, value from <table> order by value desc) where rownum <10;

> > - Oracle doesn't have bitwise operations like SQL server

There was an example in this line of messages that explained how to use and extend on the bitand function, so I will leave that alone.

I think its great to have these products compared, I have no SQL server experience and hop to learn a bit from this thread.

Greetings from Denmark

Jesper Wolf Jespersen Received on Thu Dec 07 2000 - 11:25:23 CST