After our competition a few weeks ago where we asked why SQL is better than Oracle (concluded here), I wanted to summarize the themes from the responses along with some of the comments that went with them. So here are the top themes that came out ordered by prevalence in the responses.
- Business Intelligence capabilities are built in. Everything you need to actually use your data and make sense of it is also included in SQL Server
- SQL Server Integration Services (for migrating data into your data warehouse)
- SQL Server Reporting Services which provides operational and ad-hock user generated reports from the database, which can be managed centrally
- SQL Server Analysis services for building OLAP cubes to drill into data
- Manageability:
- “The admin tools blow Oracle out of the water. You don't need to fork out for a 3rd-party admin tool just to do everyday work.” – Ben Gracewood
- “Management policies that can be used to stop a number of fat-finger fookups” – Juha Saarinen
- Price and licensing:
- “TCO: Superior scalability. No hidden costs in the licensing model. Productivity enhancing development tools.” - Geoff Coplon
- “Spatial data out of the box and not a seperate SKU… Built in BI and data mining tools… Built in reporting” – Ryan Crawcour
- Installation experience
- “Considerably easier to install (no 20 page install manual required)” – James Newton King
- Community
- “SQL Server has an incredibly friendly and "wiling to help" attitude in it's community. Blogs, twitter, newsgroups, forums, user groups. Coupled with the involvement from MVPs, Microsoft employees (including teams like CAT & PSS) who are offering their support for free” – Dave Dustin
We also got a number of comments on skills availability, scalability and High availability options (both quality and variety), pricing (go figure), security options (e.g. encryption out of the box), compression (that even works with SAP), programmability, SQL Server Integration Services (easy to use and very functional), easy back up and restore and a bunch of technical features (such as filtered indexes, sparse columns, code signing via certificates, etc).
Once again – THANK YOU to all of you who participated!