Windchill MSSQL combination: benefits? pitfaills?

[rleir]

We have been asked whether we can convert our Windchill and Oracle on RedHat system to use MS-SQL Server.

• What proportion of Windchill  installations use MS-SQL? We don't want to be on our own.
• My first try was to run MS-SQL on RedHat. Does MS-SQL work better on Windows?
• How about a WC-on-Linux and MSSQL-on-Windows combination? 
• A benefit seems to be cost. What are the pitfalls?

[avillanueva]

I had looked into this when faced with same question. From what I know its a one way switch. There are procedures to move from Oracle to SQL Server but not back. From what I gather, there are a bit more bugs and issues. Can't speak to performance but I assume cost is less.

[TomU · Accepted solution]

I think a lot of it depends on what your organization is comfortable with.

The vast majority of our customers run Windchill and the database on Windows Server OS, and use MS SQL for the database.  The customers we have who are migrating from on-prem to Azure also normally switch to MS SQL, if not already running it.

On the other hand, I believe almost all the systems that PTC hosts themselves are running Oracle on the backend.  Tech support definitely seems much more comfortable with Oracle and will often assume that Oracle is in use unless told otherwise.

From a performance perspective, per PTC, MS SQL requires 50% more CPU and RAM to achieve comparable performance to Oracle.  (See the hardware sizing guides.)  Even with the additional resources and tuning, there are certain processes that just seem to run a lot slower on MS SQL than they do on Oracle (revaluating specifically.)

I suspect that if your teams are proficient with Linux and Oracle, and you can afford the cost of the Oracle DB, the end performance will probably end up better on that environment than the equivalent MS stack.