Re: SQL Server vs Oracle

Thomas Kyte wrote:

> >"Oracle databases cannot ever reclaim storage from any deleted record
 

> >until the entire table drops." WTF ???
>
> Wow, that would be a bummer if it were true. Its simply not true at
> all.

We need to leave you and our consultant (whose resume is 7 years of Oracle) alone together. He swears up and down this is a well-known bug that Oracle has never fixed nor moved to the top of their do-list. He says it is why DBAs make a living; travelling from enterprise to enterprise, turning off the server, and copying all the tables to fresh, packed tables, deleting the old ones, and renaming the new ones.

I myself simply cannot argue the details - dumping Oracle was a team effort. I know the marketing pitches perfectly well - Oracle thinks they match SQL Server feature per feature, and SQL Server thinks it knows both the NT platform and the user interface cold. I can say that the project is much farther along (a complete database full of live data on my desk in only 3 working days) than it would have been using Oracle.

At this point the argument must devolve into petty look-and-feel points, which is all I know yet.

> A table will never shrink in size by itself but if you repeatably
> insert/delete/insert/delete/insert/delete, it won't necessarily grow.

The issue came to a head because we could not prove one way or another our Purge utility was doing anything. We have a years' worth of data minings in the database, and we tell Purge to remove the oldest month. Then we check the Space Available setting on the manager program, and it shows the same numbers. It does not "look like" anything freed.

Then a few months later the system crashes out from under our customers, unable to store anything new.

If this debate must be about X vs Y, I must say I want to go with a system that makes it a little bit easier to get things right, and shows us in the Administrator user interface exactly what is happening and why. Again, I cannot argue the details about this, and I am sure anybody familiar with Oracle "feels like" they know "what is happening and why".

Again if you tell me that we need to hire a specialist just to write a no-brainer Purge program, I must say we have better things to spend money on.

> So, a table will never get smaller however, it will not necessarily
> grow
> unbounded with a correct setting of pctused.

This could have been it - I will have another round with my colleagues :-)

• Phlip