I blogged back in March 2009 on SQL Server and Oracle scalability, and reviewed a whitepaper from Larry and the boys and their jab on Microsoft’s RDBMS in these areas of interest which I thought was interesting to say the least. Now Microsoft has published a whitepaper bashing Oracle on what RAC can and cannot do; there also seem to be several others taking note as I have, which you can read about below in a few posts that I saw out on the web. My post was sparked by my interest in Oracle, since I am currently at a multi-national client (and share office space with a top-notch Oracle DBA) who does 6BB in sales annually and has a multitude of deployments (applications, database servers, platforms, operating systems, reporting and BI tools, etc.) in its’ infrastructure, just as one might expect from a global company.
The pot has officially been stirred again. Based on TPC entries, Oracle and SQL Server haven’t been going head-to-head anyway, so I’m not sure where this is coming from. Maybe it’s the economy and Microsoft is trying to “rustle-up” some new business, or maybe it was simply time to address an old article that bashed SQL Server. I agree with others, though, who believe that a fact-based response might have been advised – sure, the Oracle dig didn’t take the high road, but Microsoft following suit is probably not the best response. Rather, it looks like a missed opportunity to me. This whitepaper is weak in my opinion; it centers mainly on the price point differences of both database servers, and all others are frivolous at-best. A response which addressed in a substantive fashion Oracle’s claims in their whitepaper would have been more appealing to me.
Here’s my opinion, which I knew that you were anxiously awaiting – SQL Server is a great product, as is Oracle. I happen to make a living by using Microsoft products, and some of them are good and some maybe not as good as others. And, likewise, within these two database platforms, there are some features in one that are better than the other, and vice-versa. It is my belief, though, that at this time Microsoft is not where Oracle is with regards to scalability. On the availability front I see not much difference (although you still can’t compare apples-to-apples even here), but in the area of scalability, I’m still under the impression that they’re ahead of us, and until Microsoft can take a single database file, and share it between more than one server, and give an administrator the tools needed to manage the resources of more than one database server across that shared database file (CPU, RAM, Disk) in a virtual fashion if you will, I won’t be completely convinced that Microsoft is where they need to be in this area.
Lee
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Anyone up for creating a Linux cluster?
Interesting takes on the subject
http://www.csharphacker.com/technicalblog/index.php/2009/06/02/microsoft-bashing-oracle-rac-the-whitepaper/
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/joe_chang/archive/2009/06/05/microsoft-s-thinking-oracle-rac-think-again-whitepaper.aspx
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jonathan_kehayias/archive/2009/06/02/rant-one-sided-whitepapers.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/sqlman/archive/2009/06/01/are-you-thinking-of-implementing-oracle-rac-you-might-want-to-think-again.aspx
The paper
http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/9/D/69D1FEA7-5B42-437A-B3BA-A4AD13E34EF6/WhyNotOracleRAC.docx