

Oracle Surprised by the Present - MarlonPro
http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2012/11/20/oracle-surprised-by-the-present.aspx

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purephase
Odd tone to the blog post.

That being said, I'm always a bit surprised that SQL Server doesn't get the
recognition that (IMO) it deserves. It is a pretty solid product. I was in a
position to use it for years and saw it mature such that it eventually
replaced legacy DB2/Adabas environments. It performed admirably and for a
fraction of the price.

If the powers that be hadn't decided Oracle at all costs (and literally at all
costs) against my counsel, they would have saved a lot of $$ and I might still
be working there.

~~~
meaty
_I'm always a bit surprised that SQL Server doesn't get the recognition that
(IMO) it deserves_

As someone who has spent 13 years with it and has dragged himself through
multiple certification cycles, the reason it doesn't get recognition is that
it's an insanely deep money pit when you have to scale it. By the time you've
forked out for the (now suddenly per core rather than CPU[1]!) enterprise
license, all the 3rd party backup and restore tools, numerous windows licenses
and had your arse audited for license compliance, you're down a lot of cash.

Not only that, from a technical perspective, it's an absolute bastard to
administer, particularly if something goes snap. It requires significantly
more meat popsicles to run than a similar sized Postgres or MySQL cluster.

To be honest, it's cheaper to solve all the problems that SQL Server solves at
an architectural level these days. It's no longer something special (was it
ever?).

The only thing going for it these days is that it's better than Oracle.

[1] This properly fucks us on the 2008->2012 upgrade cycle as our primary
machines are 4x 8 core Xeons. So that's from 4 licensable CPUs to 32
licensable CPUs. We have 4 of those machines. Bastards!

~~~
xradionut
"Not only that, from a technical perspective, it's an absolute bastard to
administer, particularly if something goes snap. It requires significantly
more meat popsicles to run than a similar sized Postgres or MySQL cluster."

Really? If you have some pro DBAs in charge you don't need mass quantities of
warm bodies. (The problem is that 90% of the folks that claim to be
experienced can't tell a clustered index from a cluster f__k.) You can
automate 95% of the job and spend the rest of the time helping users do
better.

"To be honest, it's cheaper to solve all the problems that SQL Server solves
at an architectural level these days. It's no longer something special (was it
ever?)."

Bullshit. I'm dealing with clients that insist on writing custom applications
to do complex ETL instead of using SSIS or decent third party tool. Or wasting
months writing code that reinvents SQL that's been around for decades.

~~~
MrFoof
>I'm dealing with clients that insist on writing custom applications to do
complex ETL instead of using SSIS or decent third party tool.

I have some beefs with SSIS (which I bring up to the SSIS team lead, Matt
Masson, every time we meet) but it's not as bad as so many folks seem to make
it out to be. However, what I always see is a never-ending shortage of clients
that write their own ETL systems that have 10-20% of the functionality, and
10-20% of the performance (and 10-20x the bugs). Even my current client seems
to be doing just this.

Replacing homegrown ETL systems with SSIS, ODI or PowerCenter implementations
is a great way to make money. I've seen ETL systems that folks were mighty
proud of that had throughput (granted, to some very questionably modeled "data
warehouses") measured in bytes/sec. Yes, bytes. We're talking 3 hours to get
an 2MB file into the final fact table with some custom "framework" written in
C# or Java that uses a web service for all message passing for servers within
the same rack (and will always be in the same rack). Again, not necessarily
the framework's fault either, just how poorly it's used, and how poor the data
is modeled (in the above case, I was able to rewrite it with their tools and
get the 3 hour job completing in ~50 seconds after a few days work and tearing
through their framework's source code repo). The bugs you can find are fun
too. My favorite was when the web service endpoints weren't reusing the same
connection, so they were exhausting all the ephemeral TCP ports on the
database server's TCP/IP stack -- when the job ran ~200 times faster, since
the messaging was so chatty, the ETL framework was basically DoSing their SQL
Server (for any service/application using a non-specific port).

Honestly, if you enjoy making things 100 - 10000x faster, live in the database
world. The market will present an infinite number of opportunities for you to
do so with commodity DBMSes such as SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres and Oracle.
Most of it is simply cleaning up bad data modeling decisions, cleaning up a
complete misunderstanding of how their database engine works, and overly
complicated systems doing very simple things.

\-----

I do agree that SQL Server licensing, especially when using Enterprise, can
hurt. A lot. It's really set up for scale-up architectures (and Windows
clustering could stand to be improved quite a bit), and if you dare deviate
from that notion, you get hurt rather badly.

------
MattRogish
Although I'm not a huge fan of Windows, Exchange, and the like, I am a huge
supporter (although not current a user - was a SQL Server DBA for a few years)
of SQL Server. It is probably Microsoft's finest engineering product. Not only
is it a super reliable and scalable system T-SQL is actually a user-friendly
SQL dialect, and SQL Server Enterprise Manager (or whatever it's called today)
is very user-friendly, too.

Although I'm a true-blue PostgreSQL believer, I give major props to the SQL
Server team. In comparison, Oracle is a disaster (I was reluctant/forced
Oracle 8i/9i DBA, too).

~~~
ams6110
The folks at Sybase appreciate your complements.

~~~
MattRogish
I actually was a Sybase ASE DBA for quite some time, too (spent a lot of time
in the DBA trenches - Sybase ASE is my favorite SQL DBMS) and it's my
understanding that SQL Server around the 2000/2005 mark was completely
rewritten. Although the origins of T-SQL are Sybase, the rest of the product
isn't (some of the philosophy and core architecture still is a carry-over from
ASE).

------
sciurus
Don't miss the real gem here - Ksvin Closson's investigation into what "in-
memory database" versus "database in-memory" means.

[https://kevinclosson.wordpress.com/2012/11/04/oracle-
exadata...](https://kevinclosson.wordpress.com/2012/11/04/oracle-
exadata-x3-database-in-memory-machine-timely-thoughtful-thoughts-for-the-
thinking-technologist-part-i/)

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jarito
This is surprisingly strong language for a couple of supposedly mature
companies. I think Microsoft would have been better off with a light-hearted
response that would have highlighted Oracle's reaction of being over the top
and unprofessional.

As it is, it just seems like two children throwing sand at each other.

~~~
jspaur
As a former 'softie, I view it as a 'rally the troops' tone. Us against them
with an undcurrent of 'they're scared'.

Definitely a different tone than what MSFT normally has, but they're
confident, and in a world of 7 figure license deals, it's motivation and tone
setting for re-selling partners and field staff.

------
chris_wot
It is crazy how many add-ons you need to buy from Oracle. I'm not the biggest
fan of Microsoft, but they score a pretty telling point on this issue.

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crypto5
What kind of technology is behind Present? In my understanding it's easy to
place all data to DB/FS buffers with any DB engine and get superfast
operations.

~~~
wmf
If the data is guaranteed to be in memory you can use different data
structures that are even more efficient — sometimes 10x more efficient. Ask
the TimesTen, SolidDB, or VoltDB folks.

------
sunjain
In the long run what is going to hurt SQL server is the fact that it is on
Windows only. And if you look at the technology trends for databases -
big/midsize IT shops are gravitating towards integrated solutions(Exadata e.g)
where Microsoft still relies on third party for hardware. Small shops/startups
are gravitating towards commodity hardware(primarily linux based), where trend
is more towards MySQL/Postgre/NoSQL, where Microsoft is lacking. And then the
cloud (where Microsoft does have an early presence, but then Amazon has been
there long before and Oracle is there in too)....In that context this In-
Memory database technology tussle is playing out, which was clearly ignited by
SAPs Hana (even though oracle had times-ten long before SAP came out with
Hana). So looking at future market direction, things are not looking very good
for SQL server, even though it is probably one of the best products to come
out of Microsoft and currently is doing great.

------
shabble
Seems like the Oracle rebuttal published in Forbes is 404ing (Taken down, or
just moved?), but appears to be in google cache still:

page 1:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Foracle%2F2012%2F11%2F14%2Foracle-
calls-out-microsoft-over-vaporware-fantasy%2F)

page 2:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Foracle%2F2012%2F11%2F14%2Foracle-
calls-out-microsoft-over-vaporware-fantasy%2F2%2F)

I have to say, the tone of both articles seems strangely...petty, for such
huge enterprise organisations. Odd.

------
wrath
It's interesting that when companies like Microsoft are politically correct,
we get blast because of it. The on the flip side when they seem pretty
aggressive we blast them because of it also.

Personally I like seeing facts not just words. If you're going to be
aggressive about your product, fine by me, but.... where's the proof? Where
are the un-bias comparison graphs? What use case are you using to prove your
point? Without data they all come off looking like two politicians.

All this said, I love SQL Server but never used it at a super large scale
though. What I prefer most about it are it's tools which seem to be much more
user friendly then Oracles. I'm no DBA though.

------
jacques_chester
Microsoft is playing its usual strategy here: start with a "toy" and slowly
ascend the features/quality ladder with each release; all the while
undercutting the competition on price.

That said, pretty much every enterprise database vendor will soak you for
every cent you have.

Whenever folk tell me that "relational doesn't scale", I explain that it's
been scaled up and out for decades. Don't believe me? Ring any Fortune 500 and
ask.

... and then ask how much it's costing them. Be prepared for sticker shock.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
SQL Server stopped being a "toy" a long time ago. If it ever was.

~~~
jacques_chester
True, but I don't set the "impressions" that old hands have of new entrants to
a market.

------
hayksaakian
This kind of BS is why I jumped off the SQL ship as soon as I could. I use
mongo primarily now, and postgres when SQL is necessary.

------
malkia
I think I was the only one that read it as "Oracal Surprised by the President"
(?!?!?!)

