Re: Oracle VS SQL Server - Which is best to back end ?

> 1. Installing Oracle 8i - First time I installed - It took me 3.5
hours and then my computer blue screened.

Odd that, because i installed Oracle 7 (and later 8) on my 32mb machine at home. Had problems installing at work when the oracle cd was in a cd drive on the server at work, but cured this by mapping a network drive from my machine to the cd player.

> Try to create a schema from the Enterprise manager - could
 never
> use it - had to go to command prompt and do it the "old-fashioned" way -
> dont know why the UIs are provided.
> UIs are slow too

Oracle storage manager - create a new datafile (or more than one on different drive arrays).
Oracle schema manager - create a new tablespace that uses this datafile (or more than one to improve performance).
Oracle security manager - create a new user for this tablespace and grant some privelidges.

The only time i ever had to resort to using SQL to create anything was when creating a large initial database (so i could create all required datafiles on disks and join these all into one tablespace. I find that the UI's are of a similar speed to SQL Server's.

> Compare to SQL Server - easy to install - register a SQL Server and
> start using enterprise manager - no hassles.

True. SQL Server is extremely easy to setup. Took me far less time to create my first test database than in Oracle.

> 2. Documentation - SQL Server Books online is the best ever
> Documentation on a product I have seen. After using Oracle technet - I now
> am an expert in coining keywords for HTML search:-))

Today's niggle with SQL BOL will be with error message 2739, which gives "Over time, more information about error messages either documented in this section or not documented in this section may become available" - this is totally unacceptable for a production database package. This is to do with the fact that "The text, ntext, and image data types are invalid for local variables.", that in itself is very poor. Still trying to find a workaround for this.

> 3. On Oracle's positive side - I must say the XML integration and java
> enabled programming is pretty cool. I enjoyed writing stuff for
 implementing
> these.
> In SQL Servers defense - I must say that you can write whole
> programs in the stored procedures, T-SQL is strong. And so is PL/SQL.
> BUT what lacks is that I can write a Select in a t-sql stored
 proc.
> and return a rowset.

Got round that by creating a temporary table in a procedure (CREATE TABLE #MYTABLE...) and then at the end of the procedure do a SELECT <COLUMNNAMES> FROM #MYTABLE to return the resultset to the ASP page i'm writing. Unfortunately the table includes a TEXT datatype which is where i'm currently stumped.

> No offense to anyone here:-))

None taken at all :-) It's good to talk.

Duncan Received on Tue Sep 05 2000 - 16:48:44 CEST