Last year I wrote a book review about The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture . The short of it is this: there is a shortage of fact checkers. And no, having facts checked by a community of users (AKA: Wikipedia) doesn’t work because those are the same amateurs that are running all the blogs that are passing around Miss Information like she was a bong in a room full of Libertarians. I once had a person tell me that they trust a Wikipedia entry on transaction logs more than a blog post from some guy named Paul Randal (blog | @PaulRandal), and I couldn’t believe what I heard. That’s like saying your teacher in high school knew more about The Great Gatsby than F. Scott Fitzgerald because she participated in a book club a few years ago.

The other day I found an interesting article on an Oracle blog. Yes, I read Oracle blogs, mostly for the humor. The article was comparing Oracle 11g to SQL Server 2008R2. You need to register if you want to access or download the PDF…or you can save yourself the hassle of giving Oracle your contact information and download it for yourself right now.

Go ahead and read it. I can wait.

That PDF is pure comedic gold. At least I am hoping that they were looking for something funny to be produced. If they meant for this to be a serious comparison then they fell short of the mark. If I had submitted research like this as part of my work in graduate school I would have been asked to leave the program. And to be fair not all of their statements are lies. We all know that SQL 2008 won’t run on Linux, for example. And therefore the cost of SQL Server is more than just SQL itself. But instead of sticking to the facts they decided to pick up that bong and get to testing.

Let’s look at some of the highlights. I present for your enjoyment Table 6:

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking “how the hell does it take 17 steps to create a table inside of SSMS”? That’s a great question. Let me help you understand it a bit more by showing you Task 6:

There, I hope that clears things up for you. What’s that? You dare to question the Oracle? I’m guessing you have many of the same questions that I have, such as:

How does “Expand database – comptst, right click tables, select New Table” count as zero steps?

Why did zero steps for Oracle take one second to complete?

Why don’t they tell me the tables they are trying to create? Why not show me the DDL?

Why are we comparing the GUI tools for two different platforms? That’s like comparing apples to oranges to pears to a bottle of wine and saying “wow, things sure taste different”.

I thought Oracle DBAs didn’t use the GUI? So where did they find people to perform these tasks?

What is the O/S in use for each of these tests?

Doesn’t Oracle use nHibernate to generate all their statements? (OK, that’s not fair…to anyone)

To be fair, I understand that we are talking about marketing here. That is part of the problem for me. When people see this they say “that’s just marketing, which is always full of lies”. Well, I am in marketing, and I wouldn’t ever allow something like this to be published. But the truth is that other people don’t have the same moral compass as I do. Marketing materials such as this cast a bad light on all of us.

Competitive analysis documents are wonderful things for people to digest when they need to make a decision. But documents such as this have little in the way of actual facts. It makes me wonder who their target market is, because most DBAs I know have half a brain and would see right through something like this. My guess is this is meant for people with less than half a brain.

Don’t believe me about the half a brain part? May I submit to evidence Table 13:

Yes, that’s right. Oracle backups take less time, especially when you schedule them to be run later and don’t record the amount of time they take to run as part of your “facts” and also don’t tell me about the hardware and network configurations used in your testing. But hey, why bother with such details at this point?

I could go on dissecting this document, one sentence at a time, but I would rather you judge for yourself at this point. Also, don’t think Oracle only does this against SQL Server. No, they like to go after IBM and DB2 as well.

Enjoy the laugh today.

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