Re: newbie queston: why would anyone use Oracle?

sense.
> You apparently never tried to install MS SQL Server on Linux or Unix :-)
> Also SQL Server (as shipped today) cannot scale either up or out.
> I don't mean CPU, I mean big tables (storing LOBs is not what constitutes
> a big table).
> By all means I'm obviously not the one pushing Oracle, but there sure is a
> difference ....
>
> Cheers
> Serge
> --
> Serge Rielau
> DB2 SQL Compiler Development
> IBM Toronto Lab

I have to disagree about the scale-out limits of SQL Server - check out distributed partitioned views, and MS clustering services.

Advantages of SQL Server :
- (very) easy to install and manage
- integrates very well with the OS (Windows) and various MS tools (Performance Monitoring counters, Active Directory integration, export to Excel etc)

Disadvantages of SQL Server vs Oracle :
- page-level lock escalation can occur (so readers can block other readers) - instability and security of the underlying OS (Windows) - although this has improved a lot with Windows Server 2003 - runs on 1 platform only (= Windows)
- the support for 64-bit and >4GB memory is only a couple of years old

Matthias Hoys Received on Wed Sep 21 2005 - 14:55:58 CDT