Re: newbie queston: why would anyone use Oracle?

On Wed, 21 Sep 2005 14:53:43 +0000, PJ6 amused us by writing:

> 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

Twice as expensive? Given that Oracle 'standard edition' does pretty well the same things as the Microsoft's SS Enterprise Edition, let's compare costs:

SS-EE		$19,999 US per processor   or
SS-SE		$4,999 US per processor	   or
SS-WE		$3,899 US per processor

vs

Oracle -SE	$15,000 US per processor
Oracle -SE1	$4995 US per processor (same as SE but limited to 2 CPU)

sources as of today at

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/default.mspx http://oraclestore.oracle.com/

And what about Oracle EE? In my experience, the majority of people 'forced to switch' from the SS make the decision to go Oracle EE because they do a lazy-maan's feature comparison in which EE in SS obviously means the same as EE in Oracle - which is far easier, but slightly more expensive, than reading the docco and understanding what you are doing. But if EE is required, look seriously at term licensing!

As for 'harder to maintain' - with SS, the trivial IS easy, the meaningful is impossible; with Oracle it's merely difficult across the board (until you get to 10g, in which case it's all trivial). <g>

-- 
Hans Forbrich                           
Canada-wide Oracle training and consulting
mailto: Fuzzy.GreyBeard_at_gmail.com   
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