I know that some people are passionate about their favorite technologies (see any topic on Windows vs. Macs) and over the years I have found that people can be similarly passionate about their favorite DBMS (DataBase Management System for any non-geeks who accidentally opened this thread).
From time to time in my career I have had to propose a DBMS for certain projects, and after cutting through all the marketing hype, I was always left with the feeling that there’s not a lot of difference between them - certainly not for the kind of small to medium sized applications I mostly deal with.
So usually I just recommend whatever is out there that is cheap or free and suggest that they start with that and if they outgrow it, well, then we’d take another look at it. So far as I know none of the apps have outgrown the original DBMS.
So what’s your take on it. How is Oracle better than Informix or Sybase or SQL Server?
Unisys DMSII, IBM DB products and Oracle. When you absolutely have to process every last motherfucking transaction in the room. Basically, look and see what big banks and stock exchanges use on their back-end.
I think the business or technical environment pretty well drives the decision. Oracle is better if the shop we’re talking to already uses Oracle. MS SS is better if the shop already uses that.
The projects you spec seem to the small side, where freeware is good enough. For them, purchase price matters. Struan seems to come from the hefty end of the corporate scale, and for him DB2 on the mainframe & Oracle on anything else fit his envirnment & his customers.
My firm lives in a pure MS world, so the answer is “MS SQL Server. Now, what was the question?” (I kid, but just a little.) MS SQL Server comes in several flavors, scales & costs & we havent’ found a situation where the benefits of a different DBMS outweigh our one-time costs to switch.
In general, “which X is best” questions are well suited to simple things being rated by non-experts. DBMSes are not simple things and folks with valid opinions tend to be experts.
IMHO… The very best is Oracle running on UNIX, I’m biased because that’s what I learned and have used for twenty some years. I have used MS SS on MS OS and it seems OK but the uptime compared to the Oracle/UNIX always seemed to be a problem. Our Oracle DB never came down except for scheduled maintenance and the Microsoft system seemed to need rebooting a least once a week, this was at a very large global company where we were expected to be up 24/7.
My very favorite freebie is MySQL on Ubuntu. I’ve got a small DB running on that thats been up for 4000+ hours with no problems!
That’s part of my “whatever is cheap or free” approach. If you’ve already got a DBMS installed, jut piggy-back onto that one if you can.