And what about row level locking? Sybase was the first to implement stored
procedures and triggers and Oracle was way behind on this. At that time
Sybase was growing rapidly and gaining market share. It was also at that
time that Sybase established itself with lots of custom apps being developed
in the investment services niche. That was at a time of relatively moderate
growth in the RDBMS market. Then things changed. The Client-server RDBMS
market started growing rapidly and large ERP apps came to the fore. SAP,
Peoplesoft, and the like ran on Oracle but not on Sybase. These software
companies said they could not run their apps on Sybase because of its lack
or row level locking. If that's the case then the lack of this one feature
spelled the demise of a once strong database company. Since then Sybase'
stock has plummeted and Oracle's has soared. The rest is history.
Steve Orr
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2001 5:30 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Hmm, quite a bit of this is factually incorrect, and may be based on a
comparison between the latest Sybase and an older Oracle.
Firstly, yes, Oracle is way more expensive than Sybase. Funnily enough,
this means that Oracle Corporation are financially rock-solid, and
Sybase are on the verge of collapse. A database is for life, not just
for Christmas.
Oracle tech support is at least as good as Sybase's, but that depends on
the level of support you are willing to pay for. I once worked for a
client who reported a bug and had a new build of Oracle delivered to
them on a gold CD the next morning. Oracle does have online case
management and updating, via MetaLink.
Sybase cheaper to administer? Yes, you just need to hire someone to run
"dbcc" every couple of hours :0) You have to compare like with like: one
man can row a boat across a lake, but the USS Nimitz has a crew of 6000.
And if you want one text file containing hundreds of options, well we
have init.ora for that. A Sybase database is not the same thing as an
Oracle database, it's more like a schema, with a Sybase server being
like an instance. There's one user database per server, and users are
assigned to databases, just like the way we grant roles to users. This
may make administration easier, but it also means you can't have
multiple database instances tuned for different applications on the same
hardware.
The fact that Sybase runs threaded and Oracle runs as processes is
neither here nor there. And Sybase manages memory "better", what does
that mean? Quicker, uses less, can handle more, what?
I don't understand the point about Oracle not cleaning up its temporary
segments, of course it does. And Sybase shares its tempdb between all
databases on the machine, whereas Oracle has one per instance. again
making tuning and segregation of different applications impossible.
Far better documentation? Yes, Sybooks was good in its day, but
MetaLink/TechNet have caught up now.
I guess it's a good thing that it's easy to unload data from Sybase, in
the same way that it's easy to dump a CSV file from MS Access.
The comment on disaster recovery is utter rubbish, of course Oracle can
be backed up while fully online and handling transactions. You can use
export, hot backup or RMAN. Oracle has powerful replication also, or you
can use dblinks and AQs to move data back and forth between instances
under programmatic control. Sybase can't. And later on backups, Oracle
has a range of options for backups, RMAN, Legato, hotbackup, whatever.
And, of course, there's no equivalent of "dbcc" in Oracle, we don't need
it, since datablock corruption is not a daily occurrence for us...
Sybase still does have a good presence in financial services, but that's
mainly a legacy thing, lots of T-SQL already written, just like there's
lots of COBOL already written. This is something to boast about? I think
not.
T-SQL is a pretty limited language for stored procedures, it cannot
compare to PL/SQL. Every SELECT in Oracle is an implicit cursor, true,
but that's because Oracle knows how to run cursors efficiently. Sybase
never could, this is why Sybase programmers never use cursors, not
because they're inherently a bad idea.
We are multi-threaded, it's called MTS. Next he'll be claiming that
Oracle can only take one connected client at a time!
And finally, the killer: Sybase is similar to MSSQL. Enough said!
That's about all I can be bothered to type for now. In summary, I would
like to say that Sybase is a fine product for your grandmother to store
her recipes in :0)
g
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2001 10:15 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
See below a mail I received from Sybase oriented person :) Please argue
it maybe very interesting (original mail was Sybase vs Oracle:Why to go
to Sybase?)
/Maya
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