I must disagree – I don’t think that the ideas of ‘better’ of ‘worse’ are applicable on this. They are just ‘different’. The approach between Oracle and MySQL are quite different for what we would call ‘same things’. The two DBMS indeed share lots of common things, but not quite everything works the same in both (and that is my point: they’re just different). Cheers!

SQLDeveloper is indeed a nice tool. It might be legacy, but the ‘text version’ it’s still available on 11g (check my other blog post on this blog – that was a fresh install and it had a SQL*Plus CLI tool).

bott@myhost:~$ /opt/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1/bin/sqlplus

SQL*Plus: Release 11.1.0.6.0 – Production on Tue Oct 2 10:26:57 2007

Copyright (c) 1982, 2007, Oracle. All rights reserved.

Enter user-name:

Thanks for the correction – never occurred to me to used this syntax. As mentioned, I’m new to Oracle and I must regretfully admit that I was wrong. Thanks again for the correction!

Augusto Bott at Pythian recently posted a good entry detailing some differences between Oracle and MySQL from a MySQL DBA’s perspective, From MySQL to Oracle: A Few Differences. My viewpoint is exactly the opposite, I know Oracle extremely well but I….

Great post.

If you’re going to use Oracle and MySQL, it might be beneficial for you to use SQL Developer. That’s Oracle’s GUI replacement for SQL*Plus. SQL*Plus is legacy in 10gR2 and is no longer shipped with 11g (at least not the GUI version).

LewisC

On the DDL difference: I think it’s better to only apply a difference, instead of repeating what the DBMS already knows. You state the obvious: suppose you forget something, then you would end up with something completely wrong.

You can do this in a single step in Oracle also.

SQL> ALTER TABLE names ADD (gender CHAR(1) NOT NULL CHECK (gender IN (‘M’,'F’)))
2 modify (name VARCHAR(64));

Table altered.

You can do this in one step also in Oracle.

SQL> ALTER TABLE names ADD (gender CHAR(1) NOT NULL CHECK (gender IN (‘M’,'F’)))
2 modify (name VARCHAR(64));

Table altered.

Personally, I’ve had to modify many, many Oracle schemas in the past. Development is usually an ongoing effort, developers are trying to be “agile”, and data models are added to or amended. Then there are tuning efforts (eg, creating indexes, or implementing partitioning).