A Comparative Evaluation and Investigation of MS SQL Server 2000 and Oracle 9i with respect to Integrity and SQL 2003 Standards

i Abstract Database Management and transaction processing systems occupy a crucial position in our information technology-based world. It is imperative that these systems function correctly and reflect real world actions on the data that they store, manage and manipulate. The constantly evolving nature of RDBMSs has lead to database wars among the various vendors in the market. This is evidenced by each vendor in the market making claims of the superiority of his product, hence making the task of choosing a RDBMS not an easy one for a DBA. Thus, the DBMS selection process requires consideration, knowledge and skills. One of the major drives behind the development of RDBMSs is to ensure data consistency, yet this is one of those things that do not seem like an obvious topic for Database Administrators to address directly. Furthermore this has been totally ignored by database benchmarks. Oracle and SQL Server are well established DBMSs, which are amongst the world's " Big three " DBMSs and are very strong rivals. This project gives an overview of a comparative evaluation of Oracle 9i and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 with respect to Integrity and conformity to the SQL 2003 standards. The results of testing and evaluating the current Database Management Systems help to highlight the problems found in each, hence allowing for improvements if necessary. Experiments were carried out to test for integrity and also an investigation of their conformity to the SQL 2003 standards is made. On the integrity issue, it is found that both products come with the necessary tools and functionalities to implement and maintain data integrity, thus they were found to be equal. However on the standards conformance part, although both DBMSs are not SQL 2003 conformant, Oracle 9i support more standard features than SQL Server 2000, hence it is leading.