Re: Comparing Oracle with Sybase

In article <91odd1$cm5$1_at_nnrp1.deja.com>,   Mike Krolewski <mkrolewski_at_rii.com> wrote:

> SQLNet: allows native, fast reliable connections across dozens of
> platforms. Much better than ODBC or JDBC.

Hmmm, what do you know about Netlib or OpenClient? Besides, you are really mixing things up here between different layers of a database system, just as you tried to equal Oracle with AS/400.

Oh by the way, have you ever counted the number of unanswered questions and unsolved cases in Oracle Metalink concerning DCD, zombie processes?

> PL/SQL : an excellent extension of SQL. Really powerful language for
> developing stored procedures/functions/packages.

Heard of t-sql? Talking about developing stored procedures, you can almost wrap any sql statements between create proc and go in Sybase. I wonder if you can say the same thing with Oracle. Now if you need the procedure to return a result set...have you done it before in both worlds anyway?

> 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)
> insert lacks control over the order or presence of variables
> often requires a single field primary key to complete work
>
> It would be informative to see what in Sybase complements these
> features.
>

Granted, Oracle has a whole bunch of features, many of them undocumented because they are "subject to changes". So you want to avoid these "features" as much as you can, just as you are adviced to use varchar2 but not varchar, or you'll run into a situation where all of a sudden your application stops working correctly.

I am not saying Sybase is strong in every aspect, but think about the following:

1. Since when did Oracle start supporting hot backup? Please be very specific about version and conditions when you need to do incremental back:) What if you don't use a catalog?
2. Do you want to put multiple applications in one database server or do you want to have a host of database engines in one box? For example, I have a Sybase server instance that hosts 36 applications. Do I want to configure 36 Oracle servers? If not, think about the complications such as how do you set default schema?
3. Security: the best thing you can use to simulate group is through roles, and honestly, I went a lot of pains trying to get this done when it's a piece of cake in Sybase.
4. Since when and what version does Oracle support table partitioning?

So the question is almost like "who enjoys sex better, man or woman"?

Jining Han
Sybase and Oracle DBA

Sent via Deja.com
http://www.deja.com/ Received on Tue Dec 26 2000 - 15:37:40 CET