Re: Pro's & Con's on Oracle & SQL Svr?

> > I can't think of any criteria I care less about when deciding on an RDBMS
 than
> > cost.
>
> You're obviously not in upper management.

I am a hired-gun ... a consultant for hire. And I usually report directly to upper management. My point was not the money is not important. But rather that saving money on software and hardware (buying SQL Server and NT) at the expense of losing customers due to performance and down-time, or paying employees to come in on weekends and reboot servers, or worse yet having your database hacked and losing proprietary information is no savings at all. What counts is TOTAL cost of ownership over the life of the applications life cycle.

> > Then ... and only then ... do I start worrying about the cost of the
 hardware,
> > the cost of the O/S, the cost of the RDBMS, the cost of the sysadmins, the
 cost
> > of DBAs and the cost of developers.
> > It doesn't matter what it costs if it doesn't work as a long-term
> solution.
>
> And hence the management-sys designer disagreement is born. Couple that
> with what someone reads in a magazine about the (lower) costs of whatever
> other database server, and you now have to worry about cost :-).
>
> I did not say cost should be the most important thing, but that it is
> definitely an issue, how important depends on what your place is in the
> company.

As I stated above ... of course it is. But it is the total cost of ownership ... not the cost of the software and hardware alone: Something that is always insignificant in a major development project. Of course SQL Server costs less than Oracle. Of course NT/Win2000 costs less than Solaris. Of course Oracle on Solaris will be up 7x24x365. Of course NT/Win2000 won't be.

The day the numbers change Fortune 500 companies will stop paying people like me to convert systems based on SQL Server to Oracle.

Daniel A. Morgan Received on Sun Apr 01 2001 - 01:33:33 CST