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copied!<p>Ultimately theres not a whole lot of difference now. There is very little one can do that the other can't but the out-of-the-box configs tend to differ somewhat.</p> <p>The most obvious difference is that Oracle uses SEQUENCEs and SQL Server uses auto-increment columns. There are pros and cons to each. Some prefer one over the other.</p> <p>From my experience doing Top N queries in SQL Server seems a little easier than Oracle.</p> <p>Out of the box Oracle uses MVCC (uncommitted data is non-blocking to reads by other transactions--the database maintains a consistent view). SQL Server I only discovered recently has this too but it's not the default option and is called something quite different. Transaction isolation level or something.</p> <p>PL/SQL and T-SQL are reasonably different in syntax in some areas but the concepts are mostly the same.</p> <p>Personally I found SQL Server management Studio to be OK but horrendous in some areas, like its data import/export just didn't work with auto increment primary keys. This was a known bug going back years on SQL Server 2005. I don't know if they've fixed it in 2008 or not. With PL/SQL Developer (doesn't ship as part of Oracle; it's a separate commercial product) imports and exports were a breeze.</p> <p>Oracle has an annoying limit on VARCHAR(2) columsn: limited to 4k in length. They're much longer in SQL Server (64k?).</p> <p>I found the SQL Server security model just bizarre. TCP was disabled by default (Windows authentication only) and then you had to setup a logon and a user? I never quite got that. It just seemed to be to be overly complicated whereas in Oracle its just:</p> <pre><code>CREATE USER blah IDENTIFIED BY password; GRANT CONNECT TO blah; </code></pre> <p>Done (although granting some other privileges/roles like RESOURCE is pretty common).</p> <p>I never quite figured out the backup/restore from the managemen tstudio. Recover would fail saying someone was connected to the database but that someone was me attempting to run the recover.</p> <p>And before anyone has a go at me for the above, I realize fully well that many of them stem from my lack of SQL Server experience but honestly theres still a level of consistency (with the abstraction) and portability of concepts that is expected.</p>

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