This is not a business intelligence post, but this is still such a nice article on a customer success story that I had to blog this.
ComputerWorld details a case study (link) where a customer, NextAction, moved from SQL Server to Oracle Database 10g and saw some dramatic improvements. The full article is worth a read, but here are some interesting snippets (bold formatting is mine):
In 2004, the company’s 13TB data warehouse was spread across five Microsoft SQL Server 2000 databases. But within a year, the fast-growing firm’s database had grown to 30TB spread across eight instances of SQL Server 2000.
Microsoft treated Helle well, putting NextAction into a special program for extremely large databases that included plenty of support. But within two weeks, the results were clear to Helle. “SQL Server has made great strides in the past couple of years. But like I told the Microsoft guys, it’s hard to match [Oracle’s] 15 years of evolution,” he said.
An updating statement that died after 1.5 days on SQL Server without completing took one hour and 10 minutes to finish on Oracle.
That 30TB database was shrunk to just 5TB after being rewritten -- and it was moved to one Oracle instance from eight.