A Comparative Investigation and Evaluation of Oracle9i and SQL server2000 with respect to Performance and Scalability
By Phathisile Sibanda
Supervisor: Mr John Ebden
Computer Science Department, Rhodes University
26 September 2005
Abstract: Performance and scalability are two omnipotent factors determining database availability and reliability. This is especially true for modern computer systems due to the inclusion of the Internet in Online transaction processing (OLTP) and E-commerce applications which use databases. This evolution gave birth to an enduring need for high throughput, good response time, excellent data consistency and concurrency control. This paper evaluates SQL server 2000 and Oracle 9i with respect to performance and scalability. Initial performance tests showed that at low to medium workload both database systems behaved in a similar fashion in terms of throughput and response time. At high load however Oracle 9i emerged victorious in both cases.

market and use of the Internet in databases. The first point has lead to competition between commercial and open source database vendors while the second has resulted in a need for high performance database systems. This whole controversy has in the past lead database vendors to employ numerous tricks in bid to improve the processing speed of their systems during benchmarking and thus falsely prove that their databases products are superior to other competitors. Some of their tricks include using high-speed CPUs and clusters, caching up data rows and storing SQL execution plans into
RAM prior to testing thus bypassing disk I/O access and tremendously increasing performance
(Burleson D, 2002).AS a result the author seeks to provide an independent third voice that will aid DBA in decision making.

1. Introduction
This project explores and evaluates