Re: Oracle vs. Sybase

From: Konstantin Ginzburg <konstantin.ginzburg_at_connects.com>
Date: 1996/05/22
Message-ID: <4nvsvp$5aj_at_news.mr.net>


>>Can you please tell me what are the major differences between Sybase and
>>Oracle? We are a medium sized enterprise trying to select a database
>>Engine. What should we be looking for ?
 

>>I appreciate all your help
>
>
>You should be lookin for ORACLE...its faster than SYBASE and has many more
>features. Anyway, would'nt you want to stick w/ a company thats always a
>step ahead of SYBASE? The only area I know that isnt dominated by ORACLE
>is Wall Street...and they're a bunch of conservative Yahoos anyway..ie..
>they're too lazy to convert

How do you know it's faster? Is there any reliable benchmarking information out there? (I would imagine the numbers are quite different depending on what you're doing - among other things due to different locking mechanisms [Sybase's page locking as opposed to Oracle's row locking]).

I myself worked with both Oracle 7.1 and Sybase 10, but I really don't have any objective data on which product is faster since they were used with entirely different applications. My subjective opinion is that Oracle has less problems with locking (which, actually, may be slower that problem-prone page-level locking of Sybase), has better interface between OS (at least UNIX) and RDBMS (you can execute UNIX commands from sqlplus prompt as well as execute SQL scripts from UNIX prompt - in Sybase you can do only the latter), has more flexible SQL (specifically formatting utilities and dynamic SQL - I tried to use Sybase's isql command for dynamically creating SQL scripts and found it not flexible enough).

I believe that Oracle is more flexible in tuning and DB administration, specifically in:

  • everything related to sizing and physical space allocation (spreading data across multiple disks is an important part of it);
  • application tuning (you can use tkprof utility even with your C or COBOL code, whereas Sybase's 'showplan' works only within isql session);
  • you have more flexibility in designing your backup/recovery strategy (in particular, you have a cold backup option which allows you to discard all of your redo logs instantaneously if needed - Iā€™ve seen a situation, when people waited for a few hours for Sybase to truncate its logs when they got full).

Considering that Oracle holds about 40% of the RDBMS world market, it's no surprise that it has more tools (it's own as well as 3rd party) built around the DB. It also has more configuration options, such as multithreaded server, parallel query, etc. Availability of those tools and options can be an important factor in choosing the database vendor.

I have heard an opinion that Sybase is better suited for very short transactions, that do not cause lock contention. It might be also true that Sybase is easier to start with, if all you concern with is developing an application that will generally work (that is, you aren't concern with performance).  I think it's easier for a programmer to start doing part-time Sybase DBA, than part time Oracle, because Sybase tries to do more things for you on its own. This however, comes at the price of flexibility and is going to fire back at you, when your database starts to grow.

The only possible edge of Sybase over Oracle that I know of is lower price. I'm not sure though this holds true for bigger installations since Oracle licenses for 'concurrent users' as opposed to 'number of people' for Sybase.

  After all these great things I said about Oracle, I want to back off and emphasize, that this is my subjective opinion. The facts that I worked a little bit more w/ Oracle (1 yr) than w/ Sybase (6 mo), and that I have 2 Oracle DBA classes and none  of Sybase, definitely influenced my position.   Unfortunately, I've never seen any articles or white papers, that would objectively compare RDBMS vendors (and specifically, Oracle and Sybase) - if anybody could point me out at something like this, I would greatly appreciate it. In fact, I turned to this and other news groups, hoping to find some related information. So far, I saw quite a few questions and nothing that you can consider a detailed answer. I thought, I'd type up the summary of my impression on this subject and let people comment on it.

I'm very interested in any criticism, comments, and personal opinions, that other people may have. If it's not too much trouble, please email me directly at
konstantin.ginzburg_at_connects.com as well as posting to the newsgroup. Received on Wed May 22 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST

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