Dizzy Desi (11/9/2011)
Eric M Russell (11/9/2011)
IceDread (11/8/2011)
The only advantage ms sql server has over oracle is it's price. Some would perhaps make an argument for the user interface as well. If ms sql server were to become closer in price to oracle, there is no reason at all to stay with ms sql server since it's inferior in every way.The usability of SQL Server compared to Oracle is deeper than just the GUI tools. It has to do with the underlying architecture. SQL Server is much easier to configure, secure, maintain, learn, and develope on. Even if the licensing cost of SQL Server and Oracle were identical, SQL Server would still be a more cost effective platform for developing and supporting database applications.
I must agree with you, Eric. Considering that my company has seven full-time Oracle DBAs who manage approximately 20 servers and 100 databases, and only two SQL Server DBAs (one full- and one part-time) who manage approximately 100 servers and 1000 databases, there is clearly a cost advantage for SQL Server administration. And by the way, our largest Oracle database is 200GB, and our largest SQL database is over 1TB, so it's not a matter of all of the smaller databases going into SQL.
I would love to hear from IceDread, what makes him think SQL is so inferior to Oracle (other than maybe he is more familiar with Oracle). As a DBA (both SQL and Oracle) who also develops applications, I can tell you that Oracle is very difficult to create connections for - worrying about having the client on every platform (development, acceptance, production), and worrying about the versions of the client... I find that Oracle is just more complicated than it needs to be all the way around.
I view sql server as inferior because it's less effective, it can not really compete with Oracle in processing power.
I am not familiar with Oracle, I work with ms sql server and various applications and web applications done in .net.
I maintain my view on ms sql server as inferior simply because I view processing power as important and because I dislike sql servers effectivity and reporting servers bugs and ssis sometimes extremely lacking processing power.
Concerning ssis, maybe it only should be used for importing and exporting data, at which I find it fast enough. Traversing file systems are however extremely slow and done with a few rows of c# both developed fast and in practice also much faster.
As a side note I also prefer how Oracle handles null over sql server.
Edit: Concerning the dba perspective, I can not give much input there because I've worked with maybe 20 databases in total this far in my career, not hundreds, and I usually find the issues to be with the written code and how implementations are done.