What are the main architectural differences between Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Multitenant?

Hi Akin,

First, both DBs manage your relational data on several operating systems (Linux, Windows Server, ...) and as Cloud Services. The newer architecture of Oracle tries to support you in a mixed environment where you can distribute a large DB over your own servers and cloud services. But as we always saw in the past, if a new feature of Oracle is good, Microsoft will follow.

So your main questions should be:

-How big is your DB? The bigger, the more I suggest Oracle.

-Are you in a mixed world (Cloud and your own servers)? If Cloud is Azure, I think SQL Server is a good choice.

-Is the price a topic? The liscence rules of Oracle are sometimes complicated.

Hope this helps a little.  

Hi Martin, it is no marketing rumor.

Oracle is the number one in terms of big databases and scalability. But as I wrote, Microsoft is always one step behind. 

So if the price is no question and you need the best on the market, Oracle is the choice. But to use the full power, you need someone who knows how to plan and set up the whole environment! 

The planning starts with a look at your amount of data, the decision of what response time is necessary, what is the yearly increase of the data,... 

I worked on a project with several million transactions a day and we tested Oracle and Microsoft with this result: Oracle was the better. But we must use a lot of tuning features of Oracle and optimize the hardware environment for this task. Shortly, Oracle has a lot of 'screws' to tune, but if you don't know exactly what to turn on, it will fail. 

But it is similar to SQL Server. Additional hardware is often not the solution. 

Hi Akin,

Without going into the technical details; did you have a look a the pricing of MSSQL and Oracle databases? 

I always hear that the Oracle database is better than MS SQL. But I never got to test this myself.

What I do know is that when I tell a customer the Oracle pricing, they are usually going in another direction. 

You must have a very good functional reason to go for Oracle considering the price difference. As @Patric Gehl ​suggested: a very big database is good but for a good reason.

Kind regards,

Martin Zwarthoed