This is an older survey, but it was very interesting to read a blog on one company's survey of Microsoft v Oracle Total Cost of Administration (TCA) from 2006. It's an interesting survey that looks at the cost of installing, managing, patching, etc. on both platforms. This is based on SQL Server 2000/2005 and Oracle 9i an 10g, so it's out of date on the technology, and I wonder if there have been enough changes in Oracle 11 to close the gap.

There's nothing surprising in the survey to me. SQL Server costs less, the DBAs cost less, and it's easier to administer. As a result, the cost per user, or per instance is lower than that of Oracle. That's despite the fact that larger Oracle instances tend to support more users than SQL Server. What I found was interesting, was the unit of measure.

It's not total cost of ownership (TCA), but total cost of administration (TCA). That’s an interesting measure since the price the business pays to keep the server running often outstrips the cost of the software. Therefore, the cost of a platform using the support staff is a worthwhile measure. And while I haven't seen a more recent study, this one shows that SQL Server is ahead of Oracle.

That's certainly not the only story. It's hard to measure the benefits, especially in terms of performance if one database responds quicker or works better for your company. I would argue that in most systems, the performance difference comes down to staff and code. If you have good, solid, well trained and talented staff in one of these technologies, you'll get high performing database systems.

So then it comes down to admin costs. Which you can minimize if you are using SQL Server.

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