Oracle has released a study which shows that Oracle is easier to administrator as a DBA than SQL Server.
Here is a blog article about the results. I would have to agree with that blog article that any commissioned study has to very careful about bias.
My take on both databases is this, and I am in position to know as I am a DBA for both Oracle and SQLserver.
As long as nothing goes wrong SQLserver is a breeze to admin via Enterprise Manager.
However if anything goes wrong or requires some analysis, because the SQL server GUI hides the complexity, Oracle is better and easier to diagnose and tune. This is simple stuff like determining what SQL run over a period (out-of-the-box). Auditing is also easier.
The real killer continues to be the SQLserver locking method, it sucks! I hope SQL 2005 snapshots will help, but the whole readers can block writers is awful.
I have been gathering some interesting info regarding datetime datatype in SQL 2000. That is the next blog post.
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