MS used 3 times the hardware any other solution did, just to be at the top of the list. So clueless MS-only salesmen could push a lie.
As the numbers clearly show, on equal machines, the Linux/Oracle solution beats the Win2k/SQLServer solution in both price and performance.
And scalability, and stability.
Shoot, if you throw $10+ million worth of hardware at it, pretty much any software will scream. Even Lotus Domino would seem like a decent DB.
But machine for machine, Linux and Oracle win. Which I'm certain you know already, by the tone of your posts . . .
The HP/Red Hat/Oracle solution isn't even available until next year!!!
Let me get this straight -- You actually believe that Oracle on Linux and HP machines is not currently available???
You don't even know enough about this to know that the 'availability' in that chart is for that consulting company to provide you with the canned solution, and support for that solution?
You call it "vendor lock-in". I call it "standardization".
Like I call it 'copying the work of others' and you call it 'innovation'. We're all well versed in MS doublespeak.
Are you so daft that you're incapable of writing JDBC/ODBC/SQL stored procs that are vendor-independent?
Because of the way SQLServer does joins, they don't port to other DBs. I'm certain that's on purpose, to increase MS's only marketing tool -- monopolistic lock-in (excuse me, "standarization", in your language). And the 'conversion' tools don't work on anything even remotely complex.