Re: Comparing Oracle with Sybase

In article <916ikk$fkt$1_at_nnrp1.deja.com>,   jennschac_at_my-deja.com wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am interested in the differences between Oracle and Sybase. I am a
> newbie to DBs, and want to learn about the benefits and drawbacks of
> these two major players. I am also curious about programming in Java
> for each of these databases, and issues that arise when trying to
> program for both.
>
> I would be grateful for any assistance, and direction to resources on
> this topic would also be appreciated.
>
> Thank You,
> Jennifer
>
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> http://www.deja.com/
>

I think alot of the comparison is incorrectly schewed due to personal and generally unscientific comparisons. I was working on Oracle next to an AS400 group basically trying to duplicate their work. Their opinion always was, AS400 will out perform Oracle because the simplier structure. I almost believed them, until I had to do a simple test. At least in this one case, Oracle running on a very small desktop server was outperforming ( 5-10X ) the AS400.

Back to the topic. Until very recently, Oracle had row level locking and Sybase did not. This very significant feature would/could be sufficient reason to use Oracle over Sybase.

Personally, I think Oracle has several features that are really excellent. I cannot say how Sybase compares.

The features are:
Platform availability: can be found on most platforms. Granted, it only has to run on the one that you are using. SQLNet: allows native, fast reliable connections across dozens of platforms. Much better than ODBC or JDBC. PL/SQL : an excellent extension of SQL. Really powerful language for developing stored procedures/functions/packages. OCI/proC : are great to integrating applications to the database. One of my most used features. The latest versions are multi-threaded and very stable.
SQL extension: really nice sets of functions beyond standard ANSI SQL.

I am not sure about what is supported in the way of SQL. For instance, SQLServer which was derived from Sybase:

    does not have MINUS or INTERSECT
    outer joins cannot have additional conditions assigned to them     does it allow more than one arguement in an IN clause     update does not allow setting multiple variable at the same time eg

           update <table>
               set ( <field1>,<field2>,<field3>) = (select a,b,c from y)

It would be informative to see what in Sybase complements these features.

--
Michael Krolewski
Rosetta Inpharmatics
mkrolewski_at_rii.com
              Usual disclaimers


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