I am fairly new to the SQL Server world, having been in this environment for a few years now. Previously my company was using Oracle for 15 years or so. There are many aspects of SQL Server that I prefer over Oracle, especially ease of administration. I will say, however, that on a system with similar transactions I never once experienced a transaction/concurrency problem with the Oracle database; whereas with SQL Server we have struggled with this issue, having to resort to dirty reads for some of our reporting to avert concurrency problems. It is probably true that some of our transactions could be shorter or tuned better, but that was also the case in Oracle.