EXPERT RESPONSE
Discussions like this always seem to stir emotions as
everyone has their favorite database. My favorite is
Oracle. So I tend to lean in that direction. But I'll
try to be as impartial as I can....
Oracle is one of the most robust, feature rich
database systems on the market. This does not mean
that other database systems are not worthy as well.
IBM's DB2, Microsoft's SQL Server and many others are
all very good database systems capable of handling
multiple situations very well. For the most part, it
is hard for someone to say that one vendor's solution
is "better" than the other.
Some of the areas where Oracle shines very well are
the following:
- Very Large Databases. Oracle can scale into
multi-petabyte ranges very easily. Most very large
databases in use today are running Oracle.
- Highly Concurrent Transaction Systems - Oracle can
scale well as the number of concurrent transactions
increases. SQL Server doesn't scale nearly as well due
to the OS architecture.
- Multi-platform. Oracle can be deployed on Unix,
Linux, Windows, and IBM S/390 mainframes. SQL Server
can only be deployed in Windows. IBM's DB2 can also be
deployed on the same platforms as Oracle.
- Very Stable. Oracle databases can stay up and
running for a very long time. This is very important
for 24x7 applications. SQL Server databases don't have
as good of a stability, but this is due more to the OS
going down, not the database.
These are just some of Oracle's strongpoints. Keep in
mind that other database vendors have their
strongpoints too!
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