Entry

What is the difference between MS SQL Server and Oracle ??

May 8th, 2008 20:36
dman, i can do it, Taksh Verdhan, Sakir Ali, Knud van Eeden, Joseph Martin, foo bar, Kalu Ral, Jason Ross, Asha Anthony, http://sturly.com

The major differences between the 2 databases are SQL syntax, GUI 
integration, platform, and of course, cost. 
Basically, MS SQL Server is much less expensive than Oracle, both in 
upfront costs, and in maintenance. 
But it only runs on MS. 
So if you are in a multi-platform environment, it may not be the best 
choice. However, MS does have drivers for various flavors of *nix, 
including a JDBC driver for Solaris, so this may not be an issue. 
What is more of a concern is that MS SQL server, contrary to it's 
advertising, is not really ANSI 92 compliant, but they are very close. 
In my opinion, the excellent GUI integration makes up for that flaw. 
The other thing to note is that MS SQL server will cascade locks, and 
may fallback to table locks, whereas Oracle will not. This goes hand 
in 
hand with the fact that SQL Server does not really scale well for very 
large databases. 
Oracle, by contrast, is multi-platform, scales very well, is ANSI 
compliant, but is very, very expensive. And while it has some GUI 
tools, if you are going to want an effective GUI solution, you are 
probably looking at some third party software, which brings with it 
additional overhead costs.
So I guess the true answer is that it really depends on what you are 
going to use the database for, and what platform it needs to run on. 
And of course, if you are running third party software that requires a 
database backend, the vendor that provides the software you are 
running 
may only support one or the other, so that would be a consideration 
also.
Please note, I did not even begin to address security concerns. 
I do not know enough about Oracle's security flaws/strengths to begin 
to itemize differences, but my gut feeling would be that Oracle is 
probably more secure "out of the box" than SQL Server, particularly if 
it is deployed on a non-MS platform; but that depends entirely on the 
configuration of the system and database, and the knowledge of the 
respective admins (DBA & SA).