Re: SQL Server vs Oracle

Anthony Peterson wrote:

> there really is no competition as far as the two are concerned
> (personal
> opinion and experience)., Oracle any day over SQL Server.
>
> Now, administrative cost would be a significant factor, it's more
> expensive
> to support Oracle (again my personal opinion) than SQL Server.

How unlike me to join a 'vs' thread, but...

Our company fought for a very long time to keep Oracle, and were forced to switch to Squeal Server. Administrative cost was the number one factor; someone needs to understand that no matter how fast or huge a database can get, if we can't safely run the beast we can't use it. The money we save firing a DBA can be invested in faster and fatter hardware.

The last straw: we had to pay our consultant to come in, grab us by the hair, and beat our foreheads against the ground until we repeated "Oracle databases cannot ever reclaim storage from any deleted record until the entire table drops." WTF ???

We ship turnkey mini-networks. Multiple workstations collect data from hardware, one server stores it all, and a few analysis workstations display the data. Sub-gigabyte databases. We need to wind up the server and never maintain it _ever_; our customers should be instructed to keep their filthy paws off it. Our scripts and thin clients must push data into the database, back it up, and then delete it out when it gets too old. The result should run forever.

> > Our company is currently migrating from Mumps to Oracle databases
 for
> > our online transaction processing systems.

You do not have the luxury of deleting data simply because it has become boring.

> We developed our first
> > product with Oracle 7.3.2 and all systems run on Solaris version 2.3
 to
> > 2.5.

Did I mention we use only Windows NuT?

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