December 1, 2011 at 9:32 am
Hi guys,
I'm looking for your input on something more highlevel. What I'm looking for is your view of the important topics one would need to study if they had experience in another RDBMS system, say Oracle, and how much importance you would put on them. Or say a complete noobie.
For instance learning the difference in syntax for TSQL from MSSQL to Oracle I would say is fairly important, I'd say for a DBA it would account for 10% of overall learning he would require.
I know this is a bit abstract but any thoughts or sources you could pass my way would be great.
Thanks!
December 1, 2011 at 10:34 am
Fundamental architeture. SQL Server has multiple database per instance, Oracle doesn't. Understanding some of the layout of the internals is helpful.
Backups - Make sure you have a solid grounding of any differences. This includes restores.
Scheduling - How do you get things to happen for you on the platform. Not sure how Oracle does it, but SQL Agent is important here.
December 2, 2011 at 10:39 am
Thanks, anyone else?
December 2, 2011 at 10:49 am
T-SQL vs PL/SQL is going to vary in importance depending on whether you write database software (scripts, stored procedures, functions, et al), or if you are more purely administrative.
If your job is more admin than dev, then I'd ditto the suggestions on learning specific admin tools and needs. For example, backup/restore, high-availability options, index maintenance, performance monitoring, security models and tools, server-side tracing. The order of importance of those will depend on your specific responsibilities. If this is more academic, I'd pretty much rank them in the order I just wrote them.
If your job is more dev than admin, I'd say learning the differences in execution plans and optimization would be much more important than the differences in SQL flavor. It's much more important to know how to tune a Select than it is to know the differences in Merge, for example. I'd rank use of tempdb, isolation levels, set vs cursor, trigger writing, temp tables vs table variables vs CTE vs inline sub-queries, and reading execution plans, also higher than knowing minor implementation differences. Most important is probably set vs cursor, since I understand there are big differences in the way the two engines implement those two things.
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December 5, 2011 at 9:50 am
Thanks, anyone could point me to some good reading resources for this?
December 5, 2011 at 10:12 am
What was said so far roughly covers transactional systems.
Le't not forget about things like BI, where you need to deal with Integration Services - and those are SQLS-specific -, cubes and their MDX, and eventually Reporting Services.
It is lots of ground to cover. one has to start somewhere, but IMO it is a good idea to know something about each of these animals.
For the first reading I usually recommend Rational Guides. They are five years old and getting obsolete, but they give a good starting point.
December 5, 2011 at 4:25 pm
Books Online is a good resource for getting started, as is this site. Use the searches to pick a topic and learn.
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