Re: how to compare Oracle vs SQL-Server?

In article <01bb84d3$d8656470$450310ac_at_nittany>, "Brian Moran" <brian_at_datafocus.com> writes:

>Mike,
><<
>In the enterprise manager for sqlServer when you create an
>index,
>you're locked out of the whole application. You can't use
>the EM to
>examine or modify anything else - you have to wait for it
>to finish (thank
>goodness you can schedule most of these for late at night).
>>>
>
>I agree in general that checklist can be misleading, but
>I'm wondering why
>all the negative comments about SEM. I'll be the first to
>admit that it is
>not as elegant a design from a GUI/interactive design as
>som other Windows
>products but it is head and tails above most of the tools
>you have to BUY
>from other DB vendors.
>
>BTW, you could always simply open up a second SEM when
>you're building
>you're index. Or you could have simply run the command from
>an isql/w
>window...
>
>--
>Brian Moran
>Senior Architectural Engineer
>DataFocus Inc
>MCSE, MCSD, MCT
>President, Washington D.C. SQL Server Users Group
>
>

Yea, and I've done that before (opening another copy), but this strikes me as a resource intensive workaround - a workaround of microsoft's fundamentally 'homeuser' based mindframe. The approach they seem to take in all their products seems rooted in the notion of windows based task-switching and not multitasking - For example, here I am on a pretty heavy duty piece of pc hardware, running NT 3.51 and while SEM is out building that index, I can't even move or minimize the SEM window.
SqlServer isn't a bad product - but like most everything else they produce it's always playing catchup to better, more mature products - and only does as well as it does because it's from microsoft and not because of any inherent capabilities.
And, as with everything else they produce, they seem more concerned with those reviewer checkboxes than really improving the product. They also oversell the product - sqlServer is okay for a small networked environment. It really isn't very fast compared to the competition and can't really scale to the large end. (Where as I've run DB2 on everything from a single OS/2 workstation to MVS systems with 10k users, for example) - But microsoft pushes it (along with NT) as the end all and be all of databases.
But what can you expect from a company that spends 20-40% of their revenue on advertising? We live in the age of management by magazine. Sorry for the rant <G> it has been a long week.

Mike Received on Thu Aug 08 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST