Comment by stephenhuey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stephenhuey | Hacker News Reader

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Back in 2004, a seasoned DBA was contracted to help our team set up an Oracle cluster. He said SQL Server was pretty good, but that the problem was you had to run it on Windows. In the past, he'd been in a team of 3 DBAs who kept 100 Oracle instances running on Solaris machines in a large company. After that, he helped a small financial company with their big database problems. They had 3 full-time DBAs constantly firefighting because they were running 3 Oracle instances on Windows. After he switched them over to Linux, their problems declined dramatically.

Anecdotal, but that guy saved us a lot of time and effort because he knew what he was doing, and I'd take his real life experiences over any sales rep! I'd probably also enjoy the awesome SQL Server GUI in a *nix environment if I could have that. :)

So 2004...that experience was probably running a mix of Windows Server 2000/NT. OS's that would be teenagers/in college now. It really is a different world in the server OS space (especially in the enterprise datacenter space) now.

Well, Oracle didn't stop working on their database back in 2004, either. And they didn't have to waste time playing catch up...

I don't understand all the hate for Oracle. They sell products that work well and they make a lot of money doing it. What's the problem?

> products that work well

That's... debatable. The problem is that the Oracle portfolio is now so vast, after a decade of acquisitions targeted at "surrounding" SAP, that quality levels are very uneven across the board. Some products require constant attention from specialized personnel or they'll blow up in your face, the learning curve is always very steep, and some of them are just full of bugs. And I say that as one of those specialized folks.

Also, their licensing terms (and the salespeople who espouse and enforce them) are unabashedly, shamelessly greedy.

Apart from compatibility problems/old drivers, I would use Windows 2000 today in a heartbeat.

Windows NT OTOH makes even Vista look good. Not that it isn't solid, but it's like driving a tractor.

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