Re: lies damn lies and benchmarks

I live eat and breath Oracle most days, but unfortunately on equivalent hardware, Oracle gets creamed by SQL Server:

http://www.tpc.org/

Even on larger Unix boxes, smaller Windows machines with SQL Server tend to outperform Oracle. Of course, this says nothing about stability, cost of ownership, etc. In my experience, it is *much* easier to administer and tune a stand alone SQL Server machine compared to a stand alone Oracle database on Unix, but with multiple boxes requiring several similar databases, Oracle is much easier to administer. To Oracle's credit, I have yet to see a BSOD or its equivalent where there was not a serious hardware problem on a high end Unix box running Oracle, but Oracle does and has had its fair share of bugs.

In the long run, the choice of database really comes down to what the client wants, what the needs of the application are, and what the host site can afford. Oracle has a much higher dollar to performance ratio than SQL Server, which is why SQL Server is still around and Oracle still needs to stay hungry and competitive.

Since I like administering things in Unix so much better than Windows, I will always have a bias toward software that runs on Unix. However, that is no reason not to be honest about my bread and butter - Oracle.

I think DB2 and SQL Server both pose serious threats to Oracle, and I hope that Oracle takes this seriously and continues improving its product. From my perspective, Oracle has dropped the ball with respect to performance in favor of features. Since DB2 and SQL server outperform Oracle and are catching up with respect to features, this can only go on for so long before Oracle begins to fall back quickly.

--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chris Weiss
mailto:chris_at_hpdbe.com
www.hpdbe.com
High Performance Database Engineering
Available for long and short term contracts


"Niall Litchfield" <n-litchfield_at_audit-commission.gov.uk> wrote in message
news:3cd14594$0$232$ed9e5944_at_reading.news.pipex.net...


> I see that according to the high performance labs at accupuncture (sorry

> accenture) that MSSQL outperforms Oracle running SAP R/3. It turns out

that


> this is MSSQL 2000 sp2 compared with Oracle 8.0.4! Does anyone know how

old


> 8.0.4 actually is?

>

>

>

> --

> Niall Litchfield

> Oracle DBA

> Audit Commission UK

> *****************************************

> Please include version and platform

> and SQL where applicable

> It makes life easier and increases the

> likelihood of a good answer

>

> ******************************************

>

>