When converting Oracle PL/SQL to T-SQL, there are a number of ways to do this, but this article shows us how this can be done with regular expressions in Management Studio.  Read more...

Using linked connections you can collect system information on your Oracle server from SQL server.  Read more...

More free training this month from PASS B/I, PowerShell, and Oracle Virtual Chapters.  Read more...

We soon learn, in SQL Server, that heaps are a bad thing, without necessarily understanding how or why. Jonathan Lewis is an Oracle expert who doesn't like to take such strictures for granted, especially when they don't apply to Oracle. Jonathan discovers much about how SQL Server places data, and concludes from his experiments that heaps perform badly in SQL Server because you cannot specify a fill factor for them.  Read more...

When a SQL expert moves from Oracle to SQL Server, he can spot obvious strengths and weaknesses in the product that are too familiar to be apparent to the SQL Server DBA. Jonathan Lewis is one such expert: In this article he records his train of thought whilst investigating the mechanics of the SQL Server database engine. The result makes interesting reading.  Read more...

The usefulness and utility of the SQL Server Agent cannot be overstated. Oracle Database supports the automatic starting of an instance, so whatever is associated with the Oracle instance can also be started along with the instance. The same holds true with the SQL Server instance and its agent service.  Read more...

The concluding part of the Oracle / SQL Server comparison looks at error logging, security, installation and finally querying the databases.  Read more...

Part III of the Oracle / SQL Server comparison looks at the configuration options for each database, their storage options as well as the startup and shutdown procedures.   Read more...

Part II or the Oracle / SQL Server comparison dives deeper into databases by exploring the architectural differences.   Read more...

Part I of the Oracle / SQL Server comparison looks at the various editions of each database and their structure.  Read more...

In this two part blog post we will demonstrate how to query an Oracle database from Powershell. Before we can...  Read more...

In part one we installed and configured the Oracle client software, in this post we will query an Oracle database...  Read more...

Vendor-specific hardware might make Oracle less painful to use in the future, so Chris Massey considers whether Microsoft should consider providing a more tailored and complete product with SQL Server. The verdict? "Not necessary".  Read more...

The wording of the statement about MySQL that came out from Oracle after the merger was downbeat. The implication was "Oh no! Another Blooming Database to deal with". But surely they don't plan to just let it drift?  Read more...

Many DBAs need to work with multiple platforms. New author Jagan Kumar brings us an article that helps to explain Oracle's architecture for those people used to working with SQL Server.  Read more...

One of the main features of Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (BIP) is its ability to connect to pretty much every major RDBMS on the market. Steve Callan shares the little documented steps of how to establish a connection to SQL Server.  Read more...

Microsoft SQL Server has steadily gained ground on other database systems and now surpasses the competition in terms of performance, scalability, security, developer productivity, business intelligence (BI), and compatibility with the 2007 Microsoft Office System. It achieves this at a considerably lower cost than does Oracle Database 11g.  Read more...