The study was based on some 200 interviews conducted with IT personnel in a variety of industries. The report shows that downtime was the most significant factor contributing to the disparity.
Customers often pay too much attention to the purchase price of a software product.
Results were also calculated for cost per database gigabyte. Oracle had a lower TCO in all categories. Downtime proved to be the greatest area of disparity between the two database products. In the general application environment, downtime costs are almost three times as high for Microsoft SQL Server per concurrent user as for Oracle8. In data warehousing applications, downtime costs for Microsoft SQL Server are twice as high as for Oracle8 per named user.