Re: Cost analysis for SQL Server

[Andrew Plato <intrepid_es -at- YAHOO -dot- COM>]

Excellent question and very interesting.  Here are a few things for your
bean-counters to consider:

SQL Anywhere will melt down into a semi-viscous pile of crap if you try to bang
against it with more than about 1000 connections and about 5,000 transactions
per-second. I have watched this happen with my own eyes.  It is very
depressing.  SQL Server - if properly installed and optimized can tolerate many
thousands of connections and tens of thousands of transactions per-second.

SQL Server has a considerably larger install-base than SQL Anywhere.  On the
surface that might not mean squat.  Yet when time comes time to hire some
programmers - just try finding SQL Anywhere experts. Installed-base is more
than a popularity contest, it can significantly affect your ability to hire
people to work with the system.

SQL Server in conjunctions with ASP, Visual Basic etc. come with an extensive
grab bag of pre-chewed objects which IIS can easily instantiate.  Sure IIS can
ram connections through ODBC to SQL Anywhere and you can spend eternity coding
objects to make the calls.  But with SQL Server, you can make native calls via
ISAPI to the database.

Buy BackOffice - get SQL Server.

$50,000 seems EXTREMELY high for SQL Server. Are you positive about this
amount?  I have a client who uses SQL Server as their backend for a web site -
they used their copy from BackOffice - $5000. How many connections could you
possibly have at any one time for this database?  More than likely one of the
full-service BackOffice packages will do the trick for you. There should be no
reason to spend $50,000 on SQL Server.

For $50,000 you might as well get an Oracle system which can handle 100,000
transactions per second!

If you are standardizing with MS products, there is tremendous value in using
MS products across the board.  Regardless of whatever irrational emotional
reactions people might have to this situation, standardizing with all MS
products can be very advantageous.  MS products by and large talk to each other
well. Yes, there are many people with horrific anecdotes where two MS products
did not play well together. However, there are also a zillion tales of where
two MS products DID work well together - you just never hear those stories.

Lastly, MS offers a bunch of very nice add-ons for IIS like site server,
transaction server, commerce server, etc. - which all run very nicely with a
SQL Server backend.

So whack your bean-counters on the head an tell them to relax. Go buy SQL
Server and be happy.

Andrew Plato
President / Principal Consultant
Anitian Consulting, Inc.
www.anitian.com

--- Gwen Thomas <gthomas -at- PAYSYS -dot- COM> wrote:
> Usually I'm careful to only read and post to Techwr-l during lunch hours or
> after I'm off the client's clock, but today is an exception.  Several threads
> here concern exactly what they're paying me for, and I sure appreciate all of
> your contributions!
>
> So here's a current (since lunch) situation.
> The client (a software developer) has multiple databases holding similar
> kinds of customer-related and product-related information, as well as a set
> of documentation databases and a huge call center database. They're in
> everything from Access to Foxpro to 16-bit Sybase Anywhere to whatever. Right
> now these databases aren't related, but the intrinsic relationships exist
> (thanks, Mark, for the terminology), so the logical modeling is the easy
> part.

<SNIP>


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