Re: what is the advantage of oracle over access

jielee_at_iastate.edu (Jie Li) wrote:

>My group and I are looking for information on the advantages of oracle over
>access. General observations, personal experience, or even reference on
>where to find more info would be greatly appreciated.

Oracle is an "industrial strength" database management system, capable of supporting extremely large, complex, diverse databases. It can be a pain to set-up and administer, and because of Oracle Corporation's size and installed user base, it is very slow to adapt to some industry changes (GUI DBMS management, automated size management etc.)

Access is a "desktop" database management system, suitable for things like customer databases for small firms, personal contacts, etc. It has a definate (though not specified) limit on the size of the database before performance falls over. It is sometimes refered to as a "Mickey Mouse" database, because no-one in the database industry takes it seriously (though they sometimes get burnt with this attitude)

If you only need to handle small amounts of data (less than 50Mb) use Access, or an equivalent. It has the advantage of built-in application building, and ease of use. If you want to run a big db (50Mb+) use something more powerful (Oracle, Ingres, Informix, MS SQL Server, Sybase, SQL Anywhere, SQLBase, Teradata etc. as nauseum.)

<insert $0.02 here>

Ciao
Fuzzy
:-) Received on Wed Oct 09 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST