Re: Oracle 7.1 versus MS SQL*Server

jda_at_rhh.dk (John D'Arcy) wrote:

>I am presently involved in reviewing a client's database needs. They
>are running an old (read ancient) version of oracle (5.1.17) on a UNIX box.
>I would recomend updating to Oracle 7.1, but the client seems to like
>MS SQL*Server. As I have no experience with MS SQL*Server, I would
>appreciate any comments/advantages/disadvantages/experience/good advice/
>bad advice ......

We've been writing ODBC compliant applications for a while now that run, unchanged, on Oracle, SQL*Base, Access (really sucks but runs), Watcom and Microsoft SQL Server 4.2.

Originally, we wrote for Access and the code ran unchanged under Oracle, SQL*Base and Watcom but it seems that SQL*Server 4.2 couldn't handle nested cursors. Since we had already written quite a bit of code that depended on nested cursors, we ended up rewriting a lot of code that instead of using nested cursors, stored things into temporary arrays.

Also, watch out for the number of tables in a SELECT statement. SQL Server has a 16(?) table limit in a FROM clause for a select statement. While at first glance, this might seem okay, it gets tough if you have several SELECT statements joined together with UNION clauses. The 16 table limit appears to apply to ALL the tables mentioned, not just the number of tables in an individual SELECT statement. I had to rewrite a good chunk of code to get around this in a couple of places.

In general, I think that I speak for the rest of my co-workers when I say that Microsoft SQL Server kinda sucks if you compare it to Watcom or Oracle. At least from a programmers point of view....

In SQL Server 6.0, Microsoft has promised to fix some of these problems but at least in our beta release, version 6.0 still appears to be our least common denominator. If we can get our stuff to run on SQL Server, it will run on anything else.

>Thanks in advance,
>John D'Arcy

Hope this helps

John Fruetel
jfruetel_at_ainet.com Received on Sun Jun 25 1995 - 00:00:00 CEST