Re: MS SQL Server Evaluation

"Niall Litchfield" <n-litchfield_at_audit-commission.gov.uk> wrote in message news:4051a939$0$3307$ed9e5944_at_reading.news.pipex.net... [snip]
>
> > However, almost all of the advanced features that are available in
> > Oracle, you won't find in SQL Server. Don't even look for anything
> > like RAC.
>
> *No-one* has anything like RAC. On the other hand even Mr Ellison at the
> launch of 10g spoke of having 'hundreds' of customers world wide on RAC.

You sure he wasn't just talking about his yachts?

> Until this figure gets into the thousands I can't get myself over excited
> about it. In the meantime competive products run stable secure highly
> available apps for non-Oracle customers. Sure RAC is nice (especially if
you
> run expensive RISC hardware) it isn't essential for most people.

I couldn't agree with you more, Niall. RAC is over-hyped, and as a 'dead sexy' technology, it's being adopted for a lot of wrong reasons. I flatter myself that of all the RAC students I've had, about 80% have come away from the three days saying 'Nah, RAC's not for us after all. Let's sign up for the Data Guard course'. Which is the right response most of the time for most of the people.

I'd lay a small bet that people adopt RAC for the high availability features mostly, because most boxes are not under strain, and the scale-up it (might) provide (with a following wind) is not needed. And speed-up isn't going to happen in an OLTP environment anyway.

But there are better, cheaper and easier high availability solutions out there.

'Course, if you truly need scale-up, speed-up AND high availability, there's nothing to touch it... but the number of sites that genuinely need two of the three are (I would say) vanishingly small.

As for Grid, forget it. Unless your annual turnover is in excess of $100million, I doubt you'll even think of it as an option for years and years.

Regards
HJR
> > I'm not saying that SQL Server is a bad engine. In fact, it would
> > probably work almost as well (with a little work), anywhere you might
> > consider Oracle Standard Edition. It's kind of like the low budget
> > cars you see that have that 100,000 mile warranty. On the other hand,
> > Oracle Standard Edition seems like a Toyota and the Enterprise Edition
> > is similar to a Lexus.
>
> SQL server is way ahead in terms of manageability and speed of learning -
> sure part of that is due to complexity and flexibility - but it is a real
> problem for Oracle corp (and one that 10g appears to make a damn good stab
> at). Oracle is ahead on performance, availability and flexibity.
>
> I also prefer .net dev tools to any of the j2ee tools and guess which
> integrates better with which.
>
>
> --
> Niall Litchfield
> Oracle DBA
> Audit Commission UK
>
>
Received on Fri Mar 12 2004 - 06:36:22 CST