Microsoft tries to take on Oracle - again

Flamboyant billionaire Larry Ellison, founder and chief executive of software giant Oracle, may now have more to worry about than which designer suit to buy next. His old adversary, a certain Bill Gates, the chairman and chief executive of Microsoft, has recognised that Oracle is trading in a sweet spot of the market. And not surprisingly, Gates wants a bigger bite of the cherry.

Microsoft has the desktop market sewn up. Oracle has the mid-range database and information management market sewn up. But it's no secret that the corporate money is with Ellison, and the very public 'war of words' between the two vendors is only the tip of a financial iceberg worth trillions of dollars.

Attempting to scale this iceberg was the main driver behind Microsoft's .Net initiative, and at the heart of the scheme is SQL Server, of which version 2000 has just been released. But Oracle has a clear lead in the database market, and Oracle 8i, which will soon be upgraded to 9i, is the product of choice for the vast majority of online businesses.

Originally, databases were seen as a central repository for storing essential company data, and were integral to running applications such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management. They are now also at the heart of the ebusiness revolution.

E-enabling vital information is critical, and Ellison believes: "If the internet turns out not to be the future of computing, we're toast. But if it is, we're golden."

As a result, the two software behemoths are competing heavily for this new territory.

But it appears that even the staunch anti-Microsoft camp has to admit that the supplier has a clear advantage when it comes to pricing.

Licence fees for Oracle 9i have not yet been confirmed, but it's clear when looking at charges for the current version that Oracle will need to make substantial cuts to compete at the lower end of the market.

Windows 2000 vs multiplatform

For a single-processor 550Mhz machine, an enterprise version of SQL Server currently costs $20,000, while the enterprise version of Oracle costs $55,000. This means that implementing Oracle is unlikely to be an option for smaller companies.

But organisastions at the higher end of the market are likely to be far more concerned about what the products provide than about initial outlay considerations.

Some would also say that Oracle's support for multiple platforms means it is easier to integrate into an enterprise's existing infrastructure. SQL Server, on the other hand, as with the majority of Microsoft products, has been written and optimised to run on the Windows operating system (OS).

But because Linux is becoming a darling of the ebusiness world, Microsoft runs the risk of losing out on a substantial part of the market. Oracle, meanwhile, has already persuaded the open source community that it is committed to the OS, and already supports the high-end Unix environments that often run back-end applications.

This means that Microsoft needs to persuade users not only that SQL Server is the best option, but also that Windows 2000 is too.

In some ways, choosing this combination may prove beneficial to customers, however. If they deploy Windows 2000 as the default OS, Microsoft claims it can provide all of the components necessary to create an ebusiness infrastructure such as web serving, database and messaging.

The simplicity of Microsoft

And Microsoft products always work well together because that's what they're designed to do. All of its 2000-branded offerings are able to talk to Active Directory, which means it's easy to couple lots of server applications together to create a single web presence.

Oracle's multi-platform approach, however, means that this isn't always so simple. Although Microsoft is often knocked for its fluffy wizards and graphical interfaces, they can make it easier to get a system up and running.

It can also be quicker to deploy applications under SQL Server than working with Oracle's more complex structure. This is an important factor when time is a major constraint, and the emphasis is on getting a package working as quickly as possible with the least amount of fuss.

Performance is also a crucial factor in the online world because page hits count and a single problem on a site is likely to equate to lost customers. Databases are particularly important here as they store all of the data needed for selling products online.

But Microsoft has never been keen to make comparisons between its product and Oracle's in terms of pure performance, and there is a general industry consensus that Oracle outperforms SQL Server in physical terms.

As with the majority of tests commissioned by Microsoft, however, one that it did have undertaken provided it with favourable results. The test was designed to show how much quicker trained professionals could perform tasks using SQL Server than Oracle.

Clustering services are likewise key. Oracle is able to provide clustering software for all of the platforms it supports, while Microsoft offers four-node clustering support for Exchange 2000.

Oracle goes further

Data integrity mechanisms are also necessary because if an organisation's server goes down, it could result in a loss of information. Microsoft incorporates Log Shipping software to undertake this function, synchronising the production database with a backup one by shipping transaction logs from one to the other.

Oracle takes this one step further, however, with its zero-data-loss technology, which enables the primary database to write log file updates synchronously or asynchronously to the standby database. This means that in the event of a problem, the backup database is always up to date.

The downside to both of these mechanisms is that if a malicious party cracks the application, the data will still be accepted because the database doesn't know that the user entering data is not who they claim to be.

The solution is security

So the only solution to the problem is to introduce security. Although Microsoft platforms are the most common ones to be attacked and breached, Microsoft is quick to point out that it has US Government awarded C2 certification for SQL Server 2000. This, however, only covers Active Directory and SSL connections.

Oracle, on the other hand, provides security for the two main areas of a database: users and data. Data security means that data in a database can be viewed down to the row level of a table. On top of this, customers can also encrypt the database locally and all data transmissions to and from it.

From the user perspective, Oracle also supports public key infrastructure technology, so that users with digital certificates can prove they are who they say they are.

So it's clear that the competition between the two vendors is going to be tough. Although Microsoft hopes to have won an early lead by getting its product out of the door before Oracle, as ever it is up to individual users to evaluate their requirements and decide which of the available offerings best suits them.

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