Neil Zanella wrote:
>On Mon, 26 Nov 2001, Ken Kinder wrote:
>> Oracle is certainly more full-featured, but if you know very little
about
>> databases, Oracle is not the right choice.
I agree. First of all the system requirements are high.
>For instance the Oracle Universal Installer took something like three
hours on a fairly
>high end PIII with 133MHz FSB!
Must have been a pretty lousy system then. I managed to complete an 8i
server install
on a long obsolete dual-processor SPARCstation10 in about 45 minutes. I've
heard rumblings that the
Windoze implementation of Oracle is crap when compared to the Unix ones -
maybe this is true?
>Have you ever used the sqlplus command line utility (which is the
equivalent
>of the mysql command line tool or PostgreSQL's psql command line client).
>Well, sqlplus assumes your terminal is 24x80 even after you resize it.
First day on my Oracle course they showed us how to change this (PAGESIZE &
LINESIZE settings). Granted that the
mysql command line client is way better than the Oracle equivalent.
>Now my other point: Oracle8i is highly non-SQL compliant
No it isn't! From the Oracle 8i documentation, appendix B "In addition to
full compliance at the Entry level, Oracle complies partially at the
Transitional, Intermediate, and Full levels as described in Table B-1
(including both SQL-DDL and SQL-DML) [levels defined in ANSI document,
X3.135-1992, "Database Language SQL." ]". There are a quite a few areas of
change, but most peoples problems seem to stem from using Oracle-own
feature enhancements. Not sure what the SQL99 compliance is like, as I've
not had a chance to get my hands on 9i yet.
>My last point about Oracle is that it is based on Java (see that JServer
stuff when you start
>sqlplus?) and that is perhaps one of the reason it needs so much RAM.
Oh no it isn't! A lot of the support tools use Java, (like all the trendy
webby stuff), but the database
ain't. As to RAM requirements my little SPARCstation test box only has
128MB of RAM, (sheez even my home PC has more
than this), and it runs okay, (that said I wouldn't like to run a
production system on this!!). We've got fairly chunky production
systems running on Oracle in 512MB of RAM, (not on Intel kit I hasten to
point out).
Getting back to the original question, I don't think there is such a thing
as a 'best' database. I use Oracle, DB2 and MySQL, and each has it's pros
and cons. That said, the support on MySQL is just about the best I've seen.
It's also about the best on smallish hardware, and master-slave replication
is a piece of cake to setup, (unlike Oracle :-( )
Ah well, back to sleep . . . . (oh, and mysql is way quicker to install!!)
Regards
Bob Cross, DBA and developer.
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