Horst, I knew you'd be in there with a comment. And as I suspected....the religious zealot's could not contain themselves.!!
However the following statement is just wrong. "Time has moved on though in the database scene in the past 15 years. Features like hot backup, replication, more standard compliant SQL implementations, "native" spatial data types, user defined data types, externally linkable stored procedures, write-ahead logging, point in time recovery features etc., have become standard in all serious contenders - but not in MS SQL server." Every single one of these features is available today on SQL 2000, and I am just not up-to-date with SQL 2005, but I can only suggest it is better then SQL 2000. You should have sat on one of my courses Horst....I suspect you have not been using MS SQL for well maybe 15 years or so !! Even you may have learnt something. Regards Barry -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Horst Herb Sent: Friday, 3 February 2006 1:46 PM To: General Practice Computing Group Talk Subject: Re: [GPCG_TALK] What The !! On Fri, 3 Feb 2006 12:25, Barry Lollo wrote: > That is certainly a debatable point about a "Far better Platform", mate. > I know a lot of people have a grudge against Microsoft, but I would > question the validity of that statement, or at least the criteria on > which that statement is based.!! Microsoft bought the code base of Sybase SQL (a product which at that stage was falling behind the competition and thus available for cheap) and released it's first version of MS SQL server just before 1990 if I remember right. Since then, Microsoft has spent a lot of time in making it's SQL dialect as proprietary as possible, integrating the product with other MS products, and tweaking performance without substantially changing the codebase. Time has moved on though in the database scene in the past 15 years. Features like hot backup, replication, more standard compliant SQL implementations, "native" spatial data types, user defined data types, externally linkable stored procedures, write-ahead logging, point in time recovery features etc. have become standard in all serious contenders - but not in MS SQL server. Some of such nowadays vital features can be done via expensive add-ons from MS or third parties (often not even supported after the first release), some can be emulated via ugly hacks, some are simply not available. Security, as in evry single other MS product, is a mere poorly thought through afterthought but not a core issue - which is why nobody in the serious database application world (e.g. finance sector, aviation, military) is using it What's worse however is that EVERY SINGLE OTHER SQL SERVER but MS SQL nowadays is multi-platform. It allows people to run their most important IT asset - their database - to run on the platform they trust most regardles of what platform they use on their desktop. I am not just talking about different operating systems, but especially about different hardware architectures. My free PostgreSQL for example which beats MS SQL Server feature by feature any time and every time now runs on any platform starting from my PDA, desktop systems like Macs, Windows, Linux, Unix systems right up to Mainframes of any kind. I can run backups while any number of users is accessing the system simultaneously without any noticeable slowdown - without having to purchase any extra products. I can extend the functionality of it via trigger functions in just about any modern programming language I can think of. And so forth. Compared to that, people who actually *pay* for an obviously and demonstrably inferior product don't strike me as particularly intelligent or knowledgeable. Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
