Re: newbie queston: why would anyone use Oracle?

PJ6 wrote:

> I spent years developing with SQL Server, now I'm learning Oracle. It's like
> twice as expensive, seems to me a lot harder to maintain. I never ran into
> something I couldn't do in MS SQL - why exactly would anyone go through the
> extra expense and hassle of using Oracle instead? I'm not asking to get
> anyone mad - I'd just like to know a bit more about how Oracle is different
> (and supposedly better) to make my transition make a little more sense.

Look carefully at the concurrency model. Oracle's implementation of concurrency is much more scalable: Writes never block reads. Reads never block writes. Row locking, rollbacks, redo, etc is "better" than most other products.

And even if you don't agree that Oracle's implementation is "better", it's essential to understand that it's *different*. An app will not exhibit the same behavior running against Oracle as it will agianst SQLSever in a multi-user environment due to the differences in the concurreny model. You should definitely understand the implications of this if you're moving from MSSQL to Oracle.

Peruse the first couple chapters of Tom Kite's "Expert One-on-One Oracle." for details.

//Walt Received on Wed Sep 21 2005 - 13:36:40 CDT