I have used other products like SAP or other third-party tools here and there. Most of my experience is with Microsoft Azure and I have not really considered working with other tools, platforms and solutions too much simply because Microsoft is best at integrating with their own products.  

In comparing the Microsoft and Oracle products I think the main difference comes down to ease-of-use. I think the Oracle product track and the architecture is designed for people with less depth-of-knowledge about the product. If you do not have knowledge about the Oracle products, generally the product can be maintained and useful because it is designed to work that way. But for Microsoft, if you do not have much knowledge to maintain the database and if you have a very high workload, you will end up having technology that is much more difficult to maintain.  

I think Oracle's trade secret is really incorporating a lot of features inside that were designed for less maintenance and administrative attention. For example, Oracle has something called Materialize View. It is kind of like a local duplication of physical tables. In Microsoft, there is no feature like Materialize View. From a performance perspective, it definitely will have an advantage in performance using local data and fields. Inside Oracle, the way it displays the query results is also a performance advantage. But with Oracle, even if people lack knowledge about writing more complicated PL/SQL script, they will find it easier to use. With Microsoft, if you do not know about how to write a good script, then the experience will not be as easy or as good.  

I think the ease-of-use is why Oracle is much more expensive than Microsoft Stack. But if you are going to be using SQL and scripts on a larger scale in Microsoft, you can end up with quite expensive investment anyway.  

Microsoft needs to change the license structure in my opinion. This is because I think Oracle — when it comes to visualization — has an advantage in terms of the total cost of ownership. Microsoft does not have visualization between virtual SQL and physical SQL, so customers end up paying more if they have multiple visual sequel services.