I completely agree about the usability thing. But I
still think that Oracle makes a better database than
Microsoft. They have just successfully hid that fact
through their lack of useful or practical tools.
Why use toad, or SqlPlus when you can use Query Analyzer
?
I haven't been ambitious enough to set it up myself to
test it out, but one of Oracle's main selling points for
10g is that it 'will administer itself'. I sure hope so,
because it never did before. With the price drop on
Oracle Standard edition I think the only thing they are
lacking is an atleast half decent IDE. If they don't
come out with one, then I think the new Workbench will
wreak some major havok on Oracle's ability to sell their
flagship product.
I find myself torn between the two.
We are doing a lot of projects with Oracle, and I must
say I absolutely agree with you.
I'm far from being DB expert, but I do know how to
backup, restore, import, exprot, attach, detach and
scedule in SQL Server, but I have no clue how to do that
in Oracle. Oh yes, I do know how to do this with PL/SQL
Developer, but that's not Oracle product, is it?
FYI: The "identities across multiple
tables" is called a sequence. It's not really
the same as an identity column, because it isn't
automatic. You need to request a number from it and
insert that into a table.
Anyway, I did some work with Oracle 8i and I didn't
really enjoy it. The database being case sensitive was
annoying, length limitations on column names, table
names, and key names was even more so!
I totally disagree... let get into perspective.
I'm sorry to inform most of you that an Oracle DBA is a
profession, and quite a good one. Oracle is NOT intended
for point & click (the personal editions are for
training at home).
Oracle has a lot more options so you could have
performance and scalability. If you need to develop by
yourself without a DBA, that's ok, use SQL Server and
enjoy the warm feeling of the All-Microsoft touch (SQL
server will let you drag & drop most of the
database design mistakes from Access)
If you are planning a big project with serious issues of
performance and high-availability, in most cases you
would get yourself a decend Oracle DBA, do whatever you
develop with the DBA working on his side.
With Oracle it's just the same with everything -
Learning earning and yearning !