User-Agent: Microsoft-Outlook-Express-Macintosh-Edition/5.02.2022 Subject: Re: SQL Server, Oracle or Informix From: Mark Townsend Newsgroups: comp.databases.oracle.server Message-ID: References: <3a7167c7$1@news> <954il1$cqh$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <3a78057a.12303396@news-server> <9%re6.2853$ZV.240908@typhoon.ne.mediaone.net> Mime-version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Lines: 73 Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2001 06:35:58 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.176.221.156 X-Complaints-To: abuse@home.net X-Trace: news1.frmt1.sfba.home.com 981095758 24.176.221.156 (Thu, 01 Feb 2001 22:35:58 PST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 01 Feb 2001 22:35:58 PST Organization: Excite@Home - The Leader in Broadband http://home.com/faster Comments (mainly reference URLS for the questions asked) inline > From: "Patrick Dean Rusk" > Seeing as how I am working with Oracle now, can you point me where to > look to find the best information resources about Oracle? I mean that in > earnest, not to keep a flame war going. http://otn.oracle.com > My reference to "clean, comprehensive, and accessible" refered to the > fact that most of what you need to know about the MS tools can be easily > installed on your machine, is well organized, and is searchable in a variety > of useful ways. The Oracle documentation strikes me as quite comprehensive, > but not easily searchable. Certainly, there are volumes of Oracle > information to find on the Net, but it is scattered. http://otn.oracle.com/docs/products/oracle8i/doc_index.htm > A couple key questions I could really use answered is: > > 1) Is there an up-to-date reference on performance tuning that is of the > quality of the increasingly dated 1996 O'Reilly book? http://otn.oracle.com/docs/products/oracle8i/doc_library/817_doc/server.817/ a76992/toc.htm (seriously) > 2) What is a highly regarded and affordable Oracle administration tool? Of > the shareware ones I've tried out, TOAD and EZSQL seem pretty good, the > latter being *much* less expensive. Well - YMMV, but have a look first at DBA Studio in the Oracle DBA Management Pack http://www.oracle.com/ip/deploy/database/system_mgmt/index.html > Wow! Until just a moment ago, I was under the impression that Oracle's > Enterprise Edition pricing included the following options. It doesn't. > Here's what these options add to the base Enterprise Edition price: > > Parallel Server (30%) > Partitioning (30%) > Spatial (40%) (This was the potential killer feature that Daniel's GIS > system might need) > Tuning Management Pack (10%) > > With the exception of Spatial, functionality in each of these areas *is* > included in SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. Of course, I know that most > Oracle people will say that SS2K's implementations are much less functional; > I don't know enough about them right now to speak on that point. Not just 'much less functional' - MS SQL Server simply does *not* have any capabilities equal to Parallel Server or Partitioning. They have been a little bit naughty representing to the market that they do :-) MS's 'scale out' cluster support is simply distributed union all views across a number of distinct databases and instead of triggers that are used to route the transaction to the right node with the right data - there is no specific cluster management support, no application transparency, and a slightly embarassing problem if you want secondary indexes. MS's partitioning 'equivalent' is also just union views across distinct tables with a little bit of predicate push down, actually very simple to do - and not what anybody from Oracle, Informix, IBM or Sybase would call partitioning (although Oracle sort of did at one stage :-) ). Note also that while Daniel may well require Spatial for a full blown GIS system, simple geocoding and within distance queries are provided in all Oracle8i editions without extra charge (interMedia Locator services)