MICROSOFT SQL SERVER VS ORACLE: A COMPARISON OF

POPULAR RDBMS

There are many different relational database management

systems (RDBMS). You have probably heard about Microsoft
Access, Oracle, Sybase and MySQL, but the two most popular
and widely used are Oracle and SQL Server!
In this blog, I will provide the difference between SQL and
Oracle. Both have many similarities, as well as many
differences, which I hope will definitely help you sort out in
determining which is the best for you to learn, or for your
organization to opt for their use.
SQL SERVER VS ORACLE: TOP N ROWS
I thought it’d be nice to show how different these two are for
retrieving the top number of rows.
SQL SERVER
There are two different ways to get the top rows in SQL
Server. You can either do this by [n] or by [%]. You can choose
to use an order by or not. If no ORDER BY clause is used the
rows will be based on the tables default sort order.
SELECT TOP 10 CutomerId FROM Customer
OR
SELECT TOP 1 PERCENT CustomerId FROM Customer

ORACLE
Top seems easy enough to use and it’s not the part of the
ANSI standard for SQL. TOP is not used in Oracle’s language;
instead, there’s ROWNUM.
If you’re coming from SQL Server, ROWNUM doesn’t work as
you may expect. You can’t just replace TOP with ROWNUM.
Another point is that ROWNUM is assigned before the ORDER
BY so, you may want a derived table to get the top rows with
a sort.
SELECT table_nm FROM sys.all_tables WHERE rownum <= 30;
OR for a sorted list
SELECT table_nm FROM (SELECT table_nm FROM
sys.all_tables ORDER BY table_nm ) WHERE rownum <= 30;
Simple isn’t always better!
We can use SQL Server’s TOP operator but it’s only going to
give you the top number or percent. To get the next 5 or next
[n] you’ll have to use OFFSET clause that was introduced in
SQL Server 2012. This is called Pagination and is a very
important feature for web pages or applications that want to
paginate results.
To find the next [n] in Oracle is a breeze with ROWNUM. To
paginate with ROWNUM in Oracle you can simply use two
tables like the following example:
SELECT table_nm FROM (SELECT table_nm , rownum rnum
FROM (SELECT table_nm FROM sys.all_tables ORDER BY
table_nm ) WHERE rownum <= 20) WHERE rnum > 10;
SQL SERVER VS ORACLE: PAGINATION
Paging is a really important feature for web pages and
applications. Without it, you’d be passing large amounts of
data to the application and expecting the application code to
figure out which rows it needed to display.
Thankfully, someone smart came up with a way to do this on
the database so you’re not returning gigs and gigs of data to
the web server to sort through.
SQL SERVER
SQL server 2012 introduced OFFSET for pagination. Let’s
examine the code:
SELECT CustomerId, City, PostalCode
FROM Customer
ORDER BY CustomerId OFFSET 10 ROWS FETCH NEXT 5 ROWS
ONLY
An ORDER BY clause must be specified to use OFFSET. You can
choose to Fetch next [n] or not. Specifying the FETCH NEXT
[n] will limit the rows returned to [n] while using OFFSET
without a FETCH NEXT will only omit the first [n] rows your
offset by. In this case, 10 rows at the front would be ignored.

ORACLE
Paging in Oracle uses the ROWNUM function. ROWNUM is
also used for other tasks like getting the top [n] row. Let’s
examine the code:
SELECT table_nm FROM (SELECT table_nm, rownum rnum
FROM (SELECT table_nm FROM sys.all_tables ORDER BY
table_nm) WHERE rownum <= 20) WHERE rnum > 10;
This can easily be used by an application to programmatically
get the rows you want.
According to my opinion, the OFFSET FETCH feature of SQL
Server is much easier to use. No matter which you’re using
both have the same outcome!
SQL SERVER VS ORACLE: CONVERT STRING TO DATE
SQL SERVER
There are many ways to create a date from a string:

CONVERT()
1. CAST()
2. DATEFROMPARTS()
3. DATETIMEFROMPARTS()
4. DATETIME2FROMPARTS()
5. SMALLDATETIMEFROMPARTS()
6. TIMEFROMPARTS()
7. DATETIMEOFFSETFROMPARTS()
All the above-mentioned functions are used to create a date
from a string and you also have the ISDATE() function which
tests the value to be sure it’s a date.
CONVERT() is straightforward but there’s a catch. Let me
make it sound more clear through an example…
Let’s say you want to convert a string of “MMDDYY” to date.
SELECT CONVERT(date, ‘080902‘)
Result:
2008-09-02
This is the result you get whether you use the format
parameter or not. So now you’re stuck parsing this and
passing the values to one of the FROMPARTS functions to
build your date. This is where Oracle shines.

ORACLE
The TO_DATE() function in Oracle allows a date format to be
passed. BY TO_DATE() function making date conversion really
easy. Let’s see it in action.
SELECT to_date(‘070902’, ‘mmddyy’) FROM dual;
Result:
09-JUL-02
In TO_DATE() function we can pass a date format the types of
strings.So we can pass to the TO_DATE() functions are near
endless. How about ‘‘HHMMIIDDSSYYYY’’?
SELECT to_date(‘02073908532010’, ‘mmddyy’) FROM dual;
Result:
08-JUL-10
Clearly, you’d be placed on some sort of medication if you
were storing your dates in HHMMMIDDSSYYYY string format,
but the greatness that comes out of this is that no matter the
format you can convert to a date as long as you know the
pattern.

SQL SERVER VS ORACLE: HOW TO REPLACE NULL VALUES?

NULL Values can sometimes be a real pain. Don’t worry
though there’s a simple solution to handle this pain. For this,
you can Simply replace the NULL value with another.
Comparing a column with NULL and replacing with another
value is really simple. There are so many built-in functions for
replacing NULL values.
SQL SERVER
SQL Server’s built-in function for replacing NULL values :
ISNULL().
It is very simple to use! It takes two parameters and check the
first for NULL and if NULL is found then substitutes the
second parameter for the first parameter.
SELECT ProductID, Weight, ISNULL(Weight, 0.00)
FROM Production.Product
Result:
1, NULL, 0.00
2, NULL, 0.00
Another Example:
SELECT ISNULL(NULL, ‘XYZ’)
Result
XYZ
ORACLE
Oracle’s built-in function for replacing NULL values :
NVL function
The NVL function replaces an NA value or an empty string
with a string.
Example:
SELECT NVL(city, 'N/A') FROM Customer;
The above query would return ‘n/a’ if city field contained a
null value. Otherwise, it would return the city value.
NULLIF function in Oracle is completely different to SQL.
NULLIF compares to values and if they are the same then it
returns NULL.

CONCLUDING WORDS
Composing the above has helped me understand that there is
in fact not a great deal of difference between SQL Server and
Oracle these days, as far as the functionality that they offer.
They may utilize diverse terminology to portray certain pieces
of functionality. Throughout the years as one supplier has
presented another component the other supplier has
actualized a comparable arrangement of usefulness into their
product. The features have distinctive names in each product,
so it’s not generally simple to see that same functionality
exists; however, for the most part, it’s conceivable to
accomplish a similar functionality on each database platform.
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