That, again, very much depends on your application design. Sybase SQLServer (now ASE) was designed from the ground up as an OLTP database. It required that you

That, again, very much depends on your application design. Sybase SQLServer (now ASE) was designed from the ground up as an OLTP database. It required that you keep your write and update transactions really short. I've seen - and worked on projects - that had an amazing throughput. They where, however, designed from the ground up, to perform well on the underlying database. Where Sybase' concurrency turned to dreadful, was when you ran chained transactions on isolation level 3. All I can say is: don't try this at home, folks. Also, Oracle's locking mechanism didn't come free. I remember (and my Oracle knowledge is really minimal) the dreadful, overflowing rollback log, whoms sizing was a science of its own. I'm not saying one is better then the other, but it points out quite nicely the impact of desing decisions. And how they always come with a price.