SQL Server 2008 versus Oracle 11g

Microsoft SQL Server has steadily gained ground on other database systems and now surpasses the competition in terms of performance, scalability, security, developer productivity, and business intelligence (BI). It achieves this at a considerably lower cost than does Oracle Database 11g.

As of late I’ve had the opportunity to work with both of the products from a database / data warehouse / and business intelligence perspective, and after spending time with each I can safely sum up my Oracle experience in one word: Frustrating.

This rant isn’t so much about the databases themselves but the development platform that surrounds them. There is nary a difference when it comes to back end database prowess and scalability between the two products. There is a VERY big colossal-sized difference between the development environments in working with a given solution stack.  The Microsoft tools are hands-down, no-contest, vastly superior to the Oracle tools.

It’s true that both companies have grown their business intelligence and performance management solution stacks by acquisition, but the degree at which it has happened illustrates some of the integration problems that are seemingly plaguing the Oracle landscape. On my install of Oracle 11g Enterprise + Oracle Warehouse Builder it installed somewhere around 117 gazillion different products and yet it still didn’t have what I needed to get development going. Huh? For that I needed to install Oracle’s SQL Developer which is a horribly slow Java based tool.

In fact there seems to be Java everywhere in the Oracle stack. Ubiquitous run anywhere type of application development was a good thought, and probably saved on development time, but the Java tools that Oracle has seemingly converted its whole platform over to are ugly, slow, and limited in functionality. By contrast Business Intelligence Developer Studio which is part of a handful of tools that come with SQL Server is a derivative of Visual Studio, and puts the Oracle tools to shame.

I would go so far as to say I believe that Oracle is now worthy of putting up on a shelf next to IBM as the torchbearers for legacy systems. Their strengths are in the back-end, they should stay there and stop trying to make lousy developer tools. Of course the word “make” here is inappropriate, stop buying tools that are on their last leg and trying to integrate them with your already failing stack.

How many people can you find or know that utilize Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB)?

If you can find one, do they like it?

I wish you luck, not even Oracle themselves utilized OWB to build out their Siebel Analytics warehouse components, which by the way will cost you close to 6 figures and won’t integrate with your own OWB implementation.

I figure the next few years the business intelligence development space will be dominated by Microsoft (more than they probably already are).

In my years of experience there was only one other report development tool that was a delight to work with in the same way that the Microsoft tools are today and that was Crystal Reports, which is now owned by Segat….no Business Obj…no it’s owned by SAP.  Which is unfortunate. The fear there is that Crystal gets rolled into SAP’s Enterprise stack, never to be heard from again.