Why Oracle? 15

[Mongr1l]

Hello. I'm an MS SQL 2000 developer who was recently asked the merits of switching to Oracle.

Apparently, my boss got a bug in his ear about the beauty that is Oracle.

Not being an Oracle developer, my concern is understandable. Basically, what my boss is really asking me is if I wouldn't mind learning an entirely different platform. I guess the alternative would be to hire an Oracle developer....

So... my question is this: Why all the fuss? I mean, what can Oracle do that can't be done in MS SQL 2000 or MS SQL 2005?

Keep in mind that MS SQL 2005 now comes with a great ETL package that include BI studio. I mean, honestly, what can possibly compare to that?

- mongril

 

[vongrunt]

Safety measures, safety measures...

While I was joking, this pretty much summarizes my opinion/experience about Oracle. Engine - kewl, tools - cranky, the rest - politics. Sortof.

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chemistry - the only natural science that can be broken down into the categories a) making drugs and b) blowing stuff up

 

[Mongr1l]

Wow... I leave for a weekend and you guys go nuts....

Two things I'd like to point out:

Walid makes some good points, however, I do need to respond to one of his remarks:

Did you even consider the possibility that the company’s decision, didn’t come out of the blue?

Walid, I've been a developer for 12 years. My experience coincides with the follwowing Dilbertism: The most inneffectual people are moved into management.

This means that the person making suggestions about what IT platform we should have is usually someone who has difficulty distinguishing between a Dell XPS 700 and an EtchaSketch.

In fact, I could probably get away with telling him we've already to Oracle over the weekend.


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SQLDennis:

horizontal partitioning exists in SQl server also
2005 has native partitioning, in 2000 you would create partitioned views

Very useful information. Thanks. Gave you a star for that one, bro.

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SQLSister: I couldn't have said it better. Thanks.


- mongril

 

[SQLSister]

Walid, I have been in the work force for 30 years, I have seen this before many, many times. I have been laid off and had my job at risk before. I'm not saying he should refuse to go to Oracle, I'm saying he has an obligation to point out that the decision does not make economic sense for the company. Once he has quantified this, the issue will almost certainly go away. I have done this many, many times in the past when bad ideas were floated. I have never once lost the decision when I gave management a quantified analysis of the problem. They resist you saying it's a stupid idea and won't listen, but they tend to respect anything that has been quantified. Plus, then they look bad if they ignore your analysis and thngs don;t work out well.

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[Walid]

I have been in the work force for 30 years

Very brave to admit

I'm saying he has an obligation to point out that the decision does not make economic sense for the company

Totally agree 200%.

Once he has quantified this, the issue will almost certainly go away

This was when my post was supposed to kicked in, I think it would have been best for me to start from here actually and say “And after you do all of this and they are still not convinced then…....” . By no chance I meant to imply that you advice him with something you wouldn’t do yourself, my apologies if I, unintentionally, did. I don’t know why my writing style let me down in this post? Maybe all the bad memories this post brought back. Believe me I also was laid off few times for no reason other than spending long nights and week ends researching and documenting why we shouldn’t – as a company – do what we are doing now, and how much we are going to save if we adopt a different and more productive approach. Again, forgive me if I did by any how offend you, I have nothing but full respect to every one here who give his/her time to help others.


Walid Magd (MCP)

The primary challenge of every software development team is to engineer the illusion of simplicity in the face of essential complexity.
-Grady Booch

 

[IT4EVR]

Unbiased views and unbiased benchmarks are hard to find in the IT field. Talk to a Java person about .NET and they say .NOT. Talk to a Sql Server person about Oracle, and they scoff and vice versa.

Unix admins are renowned for hating Windows, Microsoft Office aficionados roll their eyes up at Star Office, etc.

But guess what? Work gets done on all platforms and technologies.

My problem with doing a cost benefit analysis is how can you do one objectively and accurately without a taint of bias? I would think you would have to get someone from outside without any inherent bias and that will be difficult to accomplish as well as expensive.

Below is a benchmark test produced from Eweek, posted on a MySQL Server site. Take it with a grain of salt of course, but MySQL didn't sanction the benchmark.

For my two cents, if you are running a terabyte database, use Oracle on a Unix platform. Oracle doesn't play that nice with Windows for large scale databases. Sql Server 2005 has positioned itself to be a major rival to Oracle, and is preferable for medium to large databases on Windows Server OS. But don't forget the little guy, MySQL. You're going to be hearing a lot more from him in the future

http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/benchmarks/eweek.html

 

[IT4EVR]

To defray any suggestions of MySQL bias, here is the link for the actual bench mark done by EWEEK. Oracle, MySQL, MSSQL are all compared.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,293,00.asp

 

[Mongr1l]

Ok, I think I owe everyone in this thread an apology. I did leave one important fact out, albeit unintentionally. The company I work for handles call routing. This means they have to process up to 20 million records a day.

It occured to me to mention this now because of IT4EVR's benchmark link.

The company doesn't deal with websites, per se. However, from the look of the benchmark, I'm beginning to wonder if maybe Oracle isn't really the way to go.

Keep in mind that throughput for the server will increase significantly in the comming years, maybe even sooner.

Also, I need to find out if the home office isn't already using Oracle or if they are the ones contemplating it. This just occured to me from Walid's remark. The home office is responsible for handling the bulk of the record traffic. I'm betting it was them that put the bug in my bosses ear about Oracle.

However, I work at a satellite office. We provide certain services to the home office. Just because they switch to Oracle doesn't mean we have to also, other than just for the sake of having homogeneous data.


Overall, what I'm seeing in the Oracle vs Ms SQL debate is possible Performance vs Manageability.

However, it also looks like Ms SQL 2005 is making gains in the throughput arena.

Bottomline, as a satellite office, our main goal is to provide tools and services to the home office, i.e. rapid application development. My feel from the this thread is that Oracle doesn't really support rapid application development, at least not in the way Ms SQL does.

Yes, I do realize that .NET, (more specifically ADO.NET) makes different data sources a non-issue, so I could conceivably still develop a VB.NET application that pulls data from an Oracle DB as easily as an SQL DB.

However, I'm as of yet uncertain how much back-end processing we will be required to do.

As an application developer, I prefer to write back-end API's to do all the data processing. This is one of the reasons I'm so interested in OLAP Cubes. This would preclude me having to write some messy, complicated SQL Stored Proc that would return a set of values to the client app.

Also, many Off-the-Shelf applications already support OLAP, such as Excel's Pivot Tables and Office Pivot Table... not to mention Access.


Bottomline, however, goes to SQLSister. Yes, before any decision is made, a thorough cost-benefit Analysis must be done. I could attempt to do it, but I think I would be out of my league here. However, I could write a report of everything I would personally have to change in order to facilitate such a move... and, just from the information in this thread alone, it would be a very, very lengthy report.


- mongril

p.s.(Walid, please don't apologize. There wan't anything offensive in your remark. In fact, it provided valuable food for thought that I'm still contemplating. Thank you.)

 

[giovi2002]

I would advise your boss to migrate to MySQL

I do both MSSQL and open source software, in my opinion open source has a lower TCO and the biggest benefit is the active communitu, both oracle and MS charge for support services

 

[johnherman]

As someone with significant experience with both Oracle (since version 7) and SQL Server (since version 6.5), I have a few nuggets to offer.

The basic architecture of the two databases is different. When you Update a record in Oracle, it changes the main data area and writes the previous value to a Redo log while marking the row as uncommitted transaction. This means Oracle, by using what they call "Optimistic Concurrency", or something like that, is ablt to commit faster and thus easily support immediate query of recently committed rows. Oracle, however, suffers terribly if there is a rollback of a transaction, since the redo log must be used to update the main data area.

There are certain applications which show greater performance using the Oracle architecture, those which have very few rollbacks.



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The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was - Steven Wright

 

[hmckillop]

Client Tools for Oracle.
I heard Toad being mentioned as the Oracle developer tool of choice, we have now had the latest version 8.6.* and have had nothing but problems. To the extent where I have now contacted our account manager and asked for a full/partial refund. On windows 2000 it repeatedly crashed and hung when debugging procs. The technical support was limited to change colour preferences and delete the odd ini file.

In the debate of which is better, I definitely find MSSQL easier and more intuitive and as stated this is probably to do with coming from primarily a windows background.

I would guess the big difference in them is historic in that Oracle where the bigboys first, and now SQL has caught up with them is still seen as the inferior upstart when in fact it is not far from the equal.
I say not far in that I think the overall performance on similiar kit Oracle probably performs better and Oracle manages performance/locking better than SQL 2000 (havent tried SQL 2005 to say either way). I still would recommend SQL Server over Oracle though due to the ease of use of setup, installation and management.


"I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart

 

[IT4EVR]

If you need some OLAP capabalities, I believe Business Objects (formerly Crystal Reports) has a package for that.

 

[SQLSister]

Walid, I wasn't insulted. There was no need to apologize. I'm sorry if I came off as mad.

And it's not brave to admit to being in my fifties, that's just a fact of life, why hide it?

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[gmmastros]

SQLSister... You're too cool.

-George

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause. - Fortune cookie wisdom

 

[chrissie1]

Especially because she only looks to be in her thirties.

Christiaan Baes
Belgium

"My new site" - Me

 

[123FakeSt]

Especially because she only looks to be in her thirties.

So SQLSister, you single? ha ha ha. Been looking to write a 'UNION ALL' query ;-). Of course we would both need to have the same columns and data 'types'.

There are certain applications which show greater performance using the Oracle architecture, those which have very few rollbacks.

Thanks for the detail, johnherman. This thread has been a little lacking. Maybe that explains Oracle's outperforming of MS SQL in the data warehousing environment where there are few rollbacks.

The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

 

[cmmrfrds]

Another opinion on Toad for Oracle. hmckillop we use Toad 8.6 against Oracle 9.2 and it works great for us for our needs. Mainly we develop SQL, shcema searchs and meta data, object browsing, exporting, etc... We do not develop stored procedures so we don't have any experience in that area, but for the 6 SQL developers we rely on Toad extensively and it does everything we need without problems.

 

[SQLSister]

LOL yes, I'm single, but I live with my boyfriend of 24 years and you couldn't pry me away from him with a crowbar.

And chrissy, just how do you know what I look like? Or did I tell you about how I got carded when ordering a drink a couple of months ago?

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[chrissie1]

I was trying to get in your good books. But I guess that is never going to happen you're to smart for that. ;-)

Christiaan Baes
Belgium

"My new site" - Me

 

[NoCoolHandle]

Ok.. Just 1 thing...
People have hit all the main points, but good hard data about performance and cost is available at

http://www.tpc.org

the following is a chart of the top 3 perforers in Transcation Processing. Interesting is the cost per min of processing...

It compares Clustered to Non Clustered Solutions. Interestingly the NonClustered Solutions are now faster. Big Dog = DB2 not Oracle... Oracle was only slightly better than SQL Server...

Rank Company System tpmC Price/tpmC System Availability Database Operating System TP Monitor Date Submitted Cluster
1 IBM eServer p5 595 3,210,540 5.07 US $ 05/14/05 IBM DB2 UDB 8.2 IBM AIX 5L V5.3 Microsoft COM+ 11/18/04 N
2 IBM eServer p5 595 1,601,784 5.05 US $ 04/20/05 Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition IBM AIX 5L V5.3 Microsoft COM+ 04/20/05 N
3 hp Integrity Superdome 1,231,433 4.82 US $ 06/05/06 Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edt SP1 Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Ed.(64-bit)SP1 Microsoft COM+ 11/28/05 N

For what it is worth


Rob

PS And I thought this was a great thread!

 

[Mongr1l]

PS And I thought this was a great thread!

Me, too. In fact, I've decided to submit it to Oprah.

Keep your fingers crossed, everybody!!!


- mongril

p.s.(or Jerry Springer....)