Re: Oracle Vs. SQL Server

One real big difference between Oracle and SQL Server is the connections problem. SQL Server makes you open a new connection for every cursor you want to use. Thus if you need to get to three tables or queries at the same time you must have at least 3 connections to SQL Server. Thus a client is using up 3 seats. In other words, when SQL Server allows 32 users it means 32 connections. If each user needs 4 tables open at a time you really only have a 8 user system! With Oracle (same scenerio) I can have 32 users and each of them can access 4 tables at a time. (more than that actually).

This would seem innocent enough, but there is more. If you are running windoze on the client end you may only be able to get 10 - 13 connections from each client to the server. Why? If you are using ipx as the transport the SQL Server driver on the client side will only allocate up to 64K for all the connections from that machine. Since each IPX connection uses from 5.5 to 6.5K you can only get so many connections before the client side driver poops out. MS responds with "Don't do that."

If you use NetBEUI you may be able to get up to 27 connections. MS is only able to get up to about 24, but somehow we were able to eek out 3 additional ones. Nnamed pipes takes about 3K per connection.

I have been able to open at least 100 cursors at a time with Oracle without a problem.

In an complex application we found Oracle to be faster than SQL Server. While our application is not the ultimate in benchmarks, with the same data the data retrieval and updates were about 20% faster with Oracle overall. The SQL Server was running on a pentium 90 with 32 meg under NT 3.5. The Oracle running under netware on a pentium 66 with 48 meg. The disk drives were the same type and size. Neither server was doing anything else and both databases had the same amount and type of data and the same sql commands were being used in the same manner. WE made an honest effort to reasonably optimize both databases but did not look at optimization option under the sun.

I hope that this helps.

Jim Kennedy Received on Tue Nov 29 1994 - 07:38:07 CET