Re: SQL Server, Oracle or Informix

Comments (mainly reference URLS for the questions asked) inline

> From: "Patrick Dean Rusk" <ruskies_at_mediaone.net>

<snip>

> Seeing as how I am working with Oracle now, can you point me where to
> look to find the best information resources about Oracle? I mean that in
> earnest, not to keep a flame war going.

http://otn.oracle.com  

> My reference to "clean, comprehensive, and accessible" refered to the
> fact that most of what you need to know about the MS tools can be easily
> installed on your machine, is well organized, and is searchable in a variety
> of useful ways. The Oracle documentation strikes me as quite comprehensive,
> but not easily searchable. Certainly, there are volumes of Oracle
> information to find on the Net, but it is scattered.

http://otn.oracle.com/docs/products/oracle8i/doc_index.htm  

> A couple key questions I could really use answered is:
>
> 1) Is there an up-to-date reference on performance tuning that is of the
> quality of the increasingly dated 1996 O'Reilly book?

http://otn.oracle.com/docs/products/oracle8i/doc_library/817_doc/server.817/ a76992/toc.htm (seriously)  

> 2) What is a highly regarded and affordable Oracle administration tool? Of
> the shareware ones I've tried out, TOAD and EZSQL seem pretty good, the
> latter being *much* less expensive.
 

Well - YMMV, but have a look first at DBA Studio in the Oracle DBA Management Pack
http://www.oracle.com/ip/deploy/database/system_mgmt/index.html  

<snip>  

> Wow! Until just a moment ago, I was under the impression that Oracle's
> Enterprise Edition pricing included the following options. It doesn't.
> Here's what these options add to the base Enterprise Edition price:
>
> Parallel Server (30%)
> Partitioning (30%)
> Spatial (40%) (This was the potential killer feature that Daniel's GIS
> system might need)
> Tuning Management Pack (10%)
>
> With the exception of Spatial, functionality in each of these areas *is*
> included in SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. Of course, I know that most
> Oracle people will say that SS2K's implementations are much less functional;
> I don't know enough about them right now to speak on that point.

Not just 'much less functional' - MS SQL Server simply does *not* have any capabilities equal to Parallel Server or Partitioning. They have been a little bit naughty representing to the market that they do :-)

MS's 'scale out' cluster support is simply distributed union all views across a number of distinct databases and instead of triggers that are used to route the transaction to the right node with the right data - there is no specific cluster management support, no application transparency, and a slightly embarassing problem if you want secondary indexes.

MS's partitioning 'equivalent' is also just union views across distinct tables with a little bit of predicate push down, actually very simple to do - and not what anybody from Oracle, Informix, IBM or Sybase would call partitioning (although Oracle sort of did at one stage :-) ).  

Note also that while Daniel may well require Spatial for a full blown GIS system, simple geocoding and within distance queries are provided in all Oracle8i editions without extra charge (interMedia Locator services) Received on Fri Feb 02 2001 - 00:35:58 CST