Re: Comparing Oracle with Sybase

Interesting to see the number of different opinions with this comparison as my office is in the process of moving to Oracle (from Sybase) as our primary DBMS. Having had the opportunity to tune and administer a number of DBMS systems from various vendors, I'd like to think that the job can be done with either of the two in question. I've been administering Sybase for the past 6 years, so, of course, I'm biased a bit but open enough to take the time to give Oracle a fair shake. My general impression of Oracle at this point is that it's overloaded with features - most of which the average shop will not need, but which makes the DBMS appealing to a broad range of shops. It's been my experience that DBMS systems with tons of tunable parameters can be made to function more efficiently than the next vendor's system, but most shops don't have the expertise to make it so. I guess that's why Oracle is huge on the consulting side. I think that we all know that you just don't spend a couple of months with a new DBMS and expect to be able to administer a production system effectively; I believe that the learning curve is going to be a bit steep with Oracle.

There have certainly been days when I've wished that I'd never heard of Sybase; my experience with CIS (Component Integration Services) was dismal. But for the most part it's been an easy system to administer and fairly flexible to tune. I'm thinking that Oracle is going to be a bit more of a challenge - we all like challenges though, don't we? Besides, with all of the responsibilities I foresee, job security may be very good.

Why are we making the move? Our reason lies in the NEED to use SDE (Spatial Data Engine - Oracle) over SQS (Spatial Query Server - Sybase). It's a pretty sad reason to make a major move like this, I know, but I just work there.

Now that I've given my dime's worth on all that, I'd like some answers from some of you experienced Oracle DBA's. Our office has upwards of 50 databases with numerous crossreferences. Applications and databases are updated frequently so we have a fairly extensive process of developing, testing and releasing. This environment has been easy to maintain with Sybase. We've placed the bulk of our development and test databases on one database server while all production databases reside on another server. Within this environment, a particular server is used for various stages of development and testing. For each stage there exists a database (db_dev, db_test, etc.) So the same schema will exist on the same server multiple times. With my limited knowledge of Oracle, I'm struggling to map what we now have to Oracle. Would you model what I've described by placing each development and test phase on its own instance or attempt to create some type of virtual user for each phase within an instance to accomodate tables with the same names and fields with the same names?

At first glance, I thought that table spaces were synonymous with databases, but after learning a bit more, it seems that maybe an instance (what I would consider a database server) probably resembles a database in Sybase. Is this correct? I'd like to hear your take on matching up the objects in Sybase to those in Oracle: server, database, table space, instance, etc.

Thanks for any replies...

Coast

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
>
> Sent via Deja.com
> http://www.deja.com/
  Received on Thu Jan 11 2001 - 03:40:46 CET