Performance and Scalability are two important factors determining database availability and reliability. This is especially true for modern computer systems due to the inclusion of the Internet in Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and E-commerce applications which use databases. This trend has been motivated by the need to accommodate many users simultaneously accessing the databases from many different networked locations. This evolution gave birth to an enduring need for high throughput, good response time, excellent data consistency and concurrency control. This project evaluated SQL Server 2000 and Oracle 9i with respect to performance and scalability. Initial performance tests showed that at low to medium workload both database systems behaved in a similar fashion in terms of throughput, response time and resource utilisation. At high load however Oracle 9i emerged superior in all cases.

The computer systems used for this evaluation both run Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition. The Oracle 9i PC has an Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40 Hz with 1.00 GB of RAM while the SQL server is an Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz with 1.00 GB of RAM....Sibanda P

........SUPERVIOR : MR JOHN EBDEN