Re: ms-sql vs oracle on NT or UNIX?

"Joaquin Ruiseco" <jruiseco_at_msn.com> wrote:

>I just have a performance question. How does the performance of ms-SQL
>compare to Oracle on NT and what about on UNIX? Which system would you
>recommend and why? I just want to hear pros and cons of oracle vs. ms-SQL.
>

Just a little OIL on the FIRE....

When was the last time anyone saw/worked with Oracle on an NT system that was (hardware) comparable to the UNIX servers that are normally used for Oracle. It is a LITTLE unorthodox to compare a machine with multiple processors (300Mhz plus ), with huge amounts on RAM (750MB - 1GB being the normal I've worked with) with multiple disk controllers (at least multiple disks) tuned to Oracle against a single processor (Pentium 200) with 128MB and maybe 4 drives that have been improperly formatted. How many people even know how to tune an NT box for Oracle? Are the disks formatted as FAT on NTFS? If they are FAT, then any disk optimization is blown (What is the block size sit in the init.ora file?) Block size on FAT is decided by the size of the partition. How many people know the syntax to format a NTFS drive to specifiy the block size?

That said... I believe someone mentioned Novell. Now there is a real screamer... Lets take a non-OS that is optimized for file serving, and try to do something with it. It has been my MISfortune to have to install Oracle WGS with a single instance database supporting 25 users (non concurrent) in a Forms 4.5 application. There were approximately 45 tables with a total of about 1 million records. Granted it was a poor little Intel P133 with 128MB but when it hit around 7 concurrent users (depending on their activity) performance went belly up.

The customer has since changed to a P200 with 128MB and moved to NT. (Still not great) The application now degrades at about 12 users.

I have developed an application on an Intel SCO UNIX platform. It was over 2 years ago and I don't recall the hardware but it was a training/testing/development platform. It was a scaled down (data wise) version of an application that ran production on an HP machine. I remember that the DBA had a few choice words to say about running Oracle on a SCO box, but I don't recall having any real problems from the application side.

As far as MS-Sql goes, I can't say. I've neve had any experience with it. Received on Fri Feb 13 1998 - 00:00:00 CET