Re: sybase vs. oracle db admin

P. Eric Person wrote:
>
> Hello;

Hiya,

>
> I'm an Oracle DBA on a project that is just getting going. We are having
> some dissent here about the two products .. Oracle and Sybase. None of us
> really have any experience with Sybase, developping OR dba'ing .. so its
> just so much hot air. I wanted to drop a line and see if any of you are
> experienced Oracle AND Sybase dba's. I figure that way I can get a
> realistic, if not impartial, answer to my questions ...
>
> How do database management and administration tasks compare in
> the two products?

Administration and tuning is easier with Sybase. Oracle seems to require more tuning up front to get the server to run with acceptable performance. Sybase runs pretty well out of the box with mintor tuning activities (i.e. increasing memory available to server). Advanced tuning activities require about the same amount of effort with both servers.

How does DB Management differ? I'm not sure if you're asking about the differences of how a DBA manages the two products, or the differences between the ways the two products manage data. From a DBA perspective, there are a lot of semantical differences between managing databases, and a *lot* of differences in performance tuning activities. But DBA'ing is DBA'ing. In terms of how the products manage their databases... well there are a lot of really significant differences which I wouldn't even really know where to begin describing (so I won't).

> If you could choose, which would you rather use, considering you'd
> also like to provide the most stable rdbms for your mission critical
> application?

This question is kind of like "what's your favorite color" - I don't know if it's possible to get an impartial answer. I'll try to be impartial.

Oracle is more widely accepted and has a larger customer base. The corporation seems to be right on top of developments in the database industry, and churns out support for key technologies quickly. However, these solutions have traditionally been heaped on top of the all the rest of the code making up their Server. Consequently, their code base seems to be *huge* (and one might assume messy to get around in), and definitely requires more system resources to run (the larger Oracle footprint is not strictly due to lots of code - they also require more memory because of the way they've implemented logging and locking). Oracle has more products ported to it. It is easier to find good Oracle professionals than it is to find good Sybase professionals. Oracle's PL/SQL is superior to Sybase's T-SQL. I have found Oracle to be generally buggier than Sybase. I think Oracle is a market-driven company that has done extremely well. Their product is a result of their market centricity - meets the needs of the market, but was created with a lot of cut corners.

Sybase, while the company has been floundering for a while now, has a really good traditional DBMS product with System 11. As a corporation, I don't see them positioned really well for the rapidly changing data needs, however I've heard vaguely about some solutions for ORDBMS (what's the name of that product - Alternate Server or something?) Anyway, Sybase 11 is a more seamlessly distributed client/server DBMS than Oracle 7.3. The Sybase server seems to be smaller and tighter, and generally more predictable than an Oracle server.

In terms of which product I would choose to use, that would depend on a great many factors. If I'm concerned about finding DBAs, or future supportability, or product porting, etc. (those political manager-type of issues), I would probably go with Oracle. If I'm concerned with the best possible technical solution available for a particular problem, at the lowest cost, I would go with Sybase.

-- 
Brenda S. Muller
Sr. Consultant, Miaco Corporation / U S West

"Water yields, yet is able to wear down rocks and stone.
The gentle wears out the hard.  The easy outlasts the
difficult.  All people know this, yet few practice gentleness."

			- from "The Tao of Women"