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SQL VS ORACLE: A Comparative Review-Part II
In part I of the series we examined the general differences between Oralce and SQL. In this Part we shall go a little deeper and examine the differences in the way data is handled in these applications.
Index Creation Automation
It seems that most agree that outright automation, with tweaks and controls, would be a great thing. I have stumbled across a posting too from the Microsoft team about just such a routine, based a script that works with DMVs. Really worth a look – read more here.
Be sure to check out the post toward the top of the blog entry too – it has some good information about indexes, why how and where you do it, etc. Good stuff.
Using Access with SQL Server?
I wanted to pass along a recent post to the email discussion list about Access and how it talks to SQL Server. Ian Posner wrote about some key things that are happening when Access works with SQL Server, particularly with Linked Tables. The quest was whether users should be allowed/encouraged to use Access as a front-ed reporting tool against SQL Server. Here’s Ian’s note:
"ODBC by default creates server-side cursors. These impose locks on the underlying database therefore affecting concurrency. Furthermore with linked tables, Access retrieves the key data from multiple tables back to the client and performs join operations there. This increases the lock duration massively.
If they are going to use Access, I suggest:
1) Only allow Access Database Projects to connect to the database. These do not use the Jet engine at all, processing all joins on the server. However the users will have to be able to create stored procs in the database in order to save their queries. If you give them their own schema, you can sandbox them.
1) Investigate whether a new version of Access when configured as an ADP imposes server-side cursors. This you can easily check by setting up a profiler trace for stored procs with a filter of "sp_cursor%’"."
Excellent feedback!
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