Oracle XE or SQL Server Express

I'm starting a new project here (Windows Forms). What's the best option today for a small (free as in beer) DBMS?

I've used SQL Server Express on the past projects, but time and time again I hear people saying that the product from Oracle is faster and more powerful.

It will be used in a small company (around 20 users) and will not reach the 4 GB limit any time soon :)

I don't want to start a flame war on my first post, so please point me to some link showing a good (and actual) comparison between the 2 products, if possible.

PS: I've heard about IBM DB2 Express too, but I coudn't find any information about it. (Marketing material from IBM doesn't count :) )

sql-server database oracle-xe

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IMHO the major problem with SQL Server, has for a long time been, no multi-version read consistency. Fortunately this has been corrected since SQL Server 2005 with the snapshot isolation level.

If your looking for a good RDBMS for a small project requring minimal knowledge for maintenance, SQL Server Express Edition is a good pick. The SQL Server Express Edition UI is much easier to understand than RMAN or the "easier"-to-use backup scripts included with Oracle Database XE which requires offlining your database.

Oracle Database XE is on my *** list. They recently released an ODBC driver for Linux that wasn't compiled properly (ld returns missing symbols for required ODBC functions) to be at all usable (10.2.0.4). With this kind of lack of attention to any reasonable amount of QA even for a 'free' product I would think twice about going down that road.

answered 2008-09-17T16:46:21.857

Oracle XE or SQL Server Express

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