Re:If you need Oracle, you need it. (Score 1)

It is a valid question. I've been using MS SQL Server for going on 10 years now and recently picked up Oracle duties. I definitely see some advantages for Oracle but SQL Server has advantages as well. I'm amazed at the "brittleness" of new Oracle features. Over and over again in my Oracle 10G class the instructors would say "this feature still doesn't work as advertised", even on 10G2 - IOW, they hadn't worked out the bugs before going GA. Yes, MS SQL Server has bugs but not in features just not working on ship (don't get me started about how long "ship" takes for MS). PL/SQL is years ahead of MS's T-SQL implementation in terms of programmability, at least for SQL 2000. MS catches up greatly with the implementation of the .NET CLR in the middle of the MS SQL Server engine, but it is a 1.0 implementation without the maturity of PL/SQL. One thing that gets me about Oracle, though, is that for a update of a table on top of a joined record set, I have to cursor through in PL/SQL doing one row at a time. MS SQL Server's T-SQL implementation just does this in one relatively simple update statement. I was amazed at the concept that Oracle DBA's (at least as taught in an Oracle DBA class) concentrate on security, system, and space management. Programmability issues of SQL and PL/SQL coding efficiency are left to developers according to the Oracle paradigm (as it was taught by my experienced Oracle instructor). Maybe this is because the Oracle paradigm of managing every little jot and tittle of the DB environment was so complex. Since MS SQL Server is nowhere near as complex (generally), much more emphasis devolves back to the MS DBA looking at coding efficiency - arguably the greatest place to recognize performance gains. Now with SQL 2000 and SQL 2005, a well designed MS SQL Server application can exist in the TB range quite well. Those who disagree are just bigotted. With that in mind, since MS SQL Server is cheaper and MS SQL Server DBA's are cheaper, more companies will startup and live comfortably for the life of their company in the totally-MS sphere. It devolves back to money and convenience. MS SQL Server is cheaper than Oracle and when you run in a total-MS environment (MS Clients OS's, MS Server OS's, MS DBMS's, MS Middle Tier), it is just more convenient than mixing technologies from different companies and dealing with finger pointing when something goes wrong. Support is everything and MS has improved dramatically in the 10 years that I've been working with their products.