Non-Microsoft Softwares Vs Microsoft Softwares

There are 11 kinds of people.

• Those who like Microsoft Softwares.
  
• Those who do not like Microsoft Softwares.
  
• Those who do not know anything about Software.
  

Most of the time, the discussion between Windows and Linux, Free softwares and Microsoft softwares, would lead to religious debate (if both the parties have equal knowledge in their respective domains, then the debate will never end).

Some times, I would see while debating, they expose all the negative aspects of the product they support.

Some time back, one person (who supports Microsoft softwares) explaining that, SQL Server has a nice feature. It has an isolation level Read Uncommitted which is exclusive for SQL Server and not available in Oracle. I was feeling like laughing for that (but did not laugh because of various reasons).

SQL Server:
Read Uncommitted:
It returns the present state of the data even if the transaction is not committed. So, we may get dirty data. The advantage is, SQL Server will not take any lock and the query would be faster.

Read Committed:
It returns the consistent and committed data. But, it takes shared lock on the data, and that takes little more time than the above.

In Oracle, there is no Read Uncommitted, and there is only Read Committed. Read Uncommitted is more faster than Read Committed. This person was boasting of Microsoft that, it has one feature which Oracle does not have. But, the truth is, Oracle's Read Committed does not take any lock on the data. So, there is no need to use read uncommitted which gives dirty data, when we are getting accurate data without taking any lock.

If a free software supporter is going to boast of some great UI in some open source software, then the Microsoft supporter most probably laugh at that. Microsoft has been very good in developing cool and rich UI since the very beginning. Open source softwares and Oracle (including Sun) have been very good in most of the Non UI softwares. If anyone goes to the other territory, then most probably, they would defame their product.

In the above example only, if we see the scalability or performance of the databases, Oracle is much superior than SQL Server. But, if we see the IDEs or other tools of SQL Server that assist the developer, they beat the tools of Oracle.

If you think there was a mistake in the first line of this post, please read that in binary.