[Help] : Oracle Date Field (vs. SQL Server)

We're new to Oracle & SQL Server and are preparing for the implementation of a 60 Gig database which will used predominantly for query. The query speed should be fast eniough to allow for "what if" experimentation, but we don't need sub-5 minute response time. We will have to update it twice weekly (either with batch transactions or a complete rebuild). The max number of users would be 5 to 10.

Dates are important to us so we track a number of them. When we look at our data storage estimates we arrive at 60 G for SQL Server and 120 G for Oracle. This is attributable to the difference in the date field lengths. For SQL it's 4 bytes (SmallDate) and for Oracle it's 49 bytes! Although Oracle uses its own internal format to store 7 bytes each for day, month, century, year, hour, minute and second, we're only interested in century, yr, mth.

The difference in storage size is hard to rationalize and quite expensive. Are we missing something? Are there anyways around this?

Thanks.
Steve Received on Mon Jun 10 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST