Oracle patching process is a nightmare. The support guys don’t know what they’re talking about.

There was this ASM bug which reboot a server(10g RAC node) at random times. They provided a workaround(procedure to execute at every hour through job) but when it came to providing a patch they asked to upgrade to 11g because the patch is not available for 10g.

Right.

Windows are for babies…and ur family members.

I really appreciate your articles.

But NOT this article, i do not see any comment by any others picking out negatives on either SQL Server or Oracle, they supported both of them equally.

But your article seems like you don’t want others to use Oracle coz lot of patches are being released to fix bugs. Thats not good, instead of pinting out all this you might bring out the advantages of SQL Server rather than saying that Oracle have many bugs and hence they release so many number of patches.

Your statement “SQL Server is consistently more secure and much less prone to errors and bugs than Oracle DB” does show that you don’t want people to use Oracle.

Its not because i dont like SQL, am a DBA, i use and treat both of them equally.

Appreciate the others comments on this article.

No offenses Mr. Pinal, i have gone thru many of your nice articles and never found anything more biasing than this one.

I am sorry if i said something wrong.

Thanks.
Vicky

Sorry but I really have to ask you to elaborate your statement #2. I’ve done a lot of work with sockets and threads, written some articles about socket interface, TCP/IP and threading, written many socket based servers and services. I can’t see why threads would be heavier in this regard than processes.

With processes you end up with process context switches which is a heavy operation. Also inter-process communication is not a simple thing. With threads you are inside a single process space which means no context switches. Of course there are calls to kernel when dealing with mutexes and other synchoronization objects but so is in processing model also.

Regards,

Ritesh Modi

Its really a fantastic article. Keep going.

Regards,
Venkatesan Prabu .J

Its a very good topic and each one one us has different opinion and also every one should take this in +ve mode.

I will not say which one is better here. Coz each of these are best on their own.

Based on my consulting exprience in US and UK, Database servers are decided based on the following factors:

1) The application which is used to access the tables. If the front-end application is in .net or any of the microsoft products then default database server is SQL Server. If the front-end application is in Java then default database server is oracle.

2) selecting database server is entirely based on the big picture of enterprise architecture. if the firm is using SQL Server right from the begining then they preffer to go with SQL Server than changing the whole architecture.

I know these are not the only factors but these are the two answers i get normally when i review the architecture.

On the other-hand, what i have seen now a days, people are looking more towards vertica or Sybase IQ or Netezza. which are manily for datawarehouse applications. So i think in the next 2 to 3 years there would be a huge changes to various database architectures.

As you described it is point of view and as long as we find it positive in every element.

Kind Regards,
Pinal

I prefer Oracle. Not because it’s more stable (i haven’t had an issue with SQL Server), but because

1) i like the command line interface better SQL Server’s is not as featured

2) Oracle doesn’t deprecate non-ANSI syntax.

3) More functions. For example, many more windowing functions, movable windows, hierarchical queries,

4) My impression about how the community responds in Microsoft is “use this because it works”. In Oracle its “use this because it’s correct.” I prefer the latter approach.

5) If i see one product with 100 reported bugs and one with 10, i’d question if there are 100 in the one because it is worse, or 10 in the other because they don’t report everything. Or because it isn’t as well tested. Or because people are happy with workarounds that just work.

6) Oracle longevity has proven the product. SQL Server until recently was putting in basic functionality. More than one million records in a TABLE and using multiple schemata come to mind. With 2005 and 2008 SQL Server has most of the basics, but it comes with a feeling of “ok, we’re new at this”.

7) The SQL Server blogs are mostly about “here’s a neat way to do this” and “this is faster in some scenarios”. I think “fun”.

The Oracle blogs are mostly informative, “here’s how this works” and “Oracle uses c(a+b) for this calculation”. I think “informative”.

Both have both though. This is just an impression of the majority, that i have after reading each for a couple years.

–

I am using SQL Server for my job, and it works well. It does things Oracle does not like CROSS APPLY and TOP with are really convenient and useful. When asked for a comparison on our reporting project, i keep telling people SQL Server 2005 (we’re probably moving to 2008 next year) will do the job, and we don’t even need the data warehouse because SQL Server will handle the job.

So, i hope you don’t think i’m saying SQL Server is bad. I simply prefer the Oracle model (if that’s the right word, or “paradigm”).