Re: MS SQL Server Evaluation

"Howard J. Rogers" <hjr_at_dizwell.com> wrote in message news:4051aecd$0$8354$afc38c87_at_news.optusnet.com.au...
>
> "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?

LOL
>
> > 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.

Now I have seen a couple of cases from large companies (not us) where RAC was effectively free and allowed them to junk AIX or HPUX in favour of Linux/Intel cheap boxes. that would be a good argument that had nothing to do with performance or HA.

> '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.

Our annual turnover is in excess of GBP100m (or was last time I looked) - Std Edition does just fine. Of course with 10g I'll get RAC free with std edition....

-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
Audit Commission UK