Re: Sybase vs Oracle - which is better?

Narayanan,

    Thanks for your insights. I'm using SQLAnywhere. I'm happy with it. It's fast. A lot of the features that you mentioned in Oracle I have available in SA. It would be nice to have the big Sybase product be as capable as their low cost product. SQLAnywhere has about everything Oracle has. A lot of the things that are important to you are important to me. From a capability standpoint, Oracle is a lot closer to SQLAnywhere than it is to SQL Server. Missing the capabilities would be OK if I never experienced being able to control when triggers fired. However, once you have them, you do not want to give them up. You are able to do so much more in the server instead of the application that way. Row level locking is another one. I need it. I know that Sybase has it now. But before that, why should I have to screw around padding row sizes.

With Oracle, I don't like the "different" ways of doing things. I'm investigating Ingres at this time. It has about the best SQL 92 implementation that I know of aside from SQLAnywhere. It takes very little of time to administer. However, there are pieces missing in Ingres. There are still some things that Oracle seems to have that look good to me. Oracle has a lot more accounting and support applications available.

Thanks for your observations. Those are some of the exact questions that I had in my mind that needed answering concerning Oracle. Had I found these capabilities in SQL Server, I wouldn't be here. It was a real let down for me to look at bringing something to SQL Server, and finding that it is missing all kinds of things that their little environment has.

From my own simple way of thinking, I would think that they would expand the technology of SQLAnywhere and dump SQL Server. There must be a reason that that doesn't make sense. I may just stick with SQLAnywhere. OTOH, I would hate to run into product limitations as it is used to run a multi-plant manufacturing company's ERP system. People are always amazed when the see us running SQLAnywhere, and say that it's a fine department server, but not for the enterprise. Since I moved it from NT to a NetWare NLM, the performance went up between at least 4 times, to normally 10 times the speed. It has over 100 users on it, and ERP processes pound it, and it gives great service. Until someone can show me the error or my thinking, I don't know why I should change. I have no reason to believe at this point that another server could help me any more if I grew another 400%. The power of processors doubles every 18 months, and I can always do multi-processing.

Thanks,
Jack Toering Received on Mon Nov 30 1998 - 00:00:00 CST