Re: Oracle vs. Microsoft

Good morning Thomas. I am now an application development consultant working on a rather large Oracle/Delphi project that will, by the end of 2000, support about 1,500 users, and have about 3 to 5 million customers (in the db) on-line. Prior to this, for 15 years, I owned and ran a small (15 employees) software development company that, initially had 2 DOS based products on the market. These products (MapconII & BOOST) are install in about 1,000 companies worldwide, and are still in use today. This time last year I realized that I could make a good bit more money as a consultant, with a lot less responsibility, so I liquidated the business. Anyway, the last major development project the company completed was an app that would run on Oracle, MsSql, and Interbase (a Borland product), using Delphi3 as the GUI tool. Needless to say, we learned a lot about Oracle & MsSql.

Stated as simply as possible, Oracle is a much more !!!!STABLE!!!! db than MsSql, at least as of now. Oracle's programming language (Pl/SQL) follows the Sql92 standards very well. MsSql, on the other hand.....well....., they (MS) have their own way of doing things, and in many cases, their way (MS) was quite different.

That aside, the main issue for me was stability. Obviously, since we (my company) had to support anything that we sold and installed, supportability was a huge factor. In this regard, Oracle is FAR SUPERIOR to MsSql. For example, we could take a block of MsSql back-end code (especially using CURSORS), run the code on 10 different NT boxes running the same version of MsSql, and, at times, got 10 different results. With Oracle 7 or 8 or Personal, regardless of the hardware platform, the code always produced the same results, which is what you would expect. In addition, with MsSql we found out (the hard way) that you MUST run the DBCC utility just about every day, and/or after any job that affected a lot of rows in the db. If you didn't run the DBCC utility regulary, your app would begin to act weird. Like CURSORS would begin to fetch incorrect results, and indexes wouldn't be accurate, and the like. Obviously, with Oracle, this was NEVER the case.

It may sound like I am slamming MsSql. I am not, really. But, it has been my expirence that MsSql, when used to support a large db/user population, required a lot of babysitting/hand holding to keep it running. Oracle, on the other hand, simply didn't need much support after the db was up and running.

Good luck. Received on Mon Dec 06 1999 - 07:06:33 CST