Actually, from the client's perspective, I didn't see any difference in accessing Oracle vs. Sybase or MS SQL. I installed all 3 on my NT at home and create an identical set of tables (an address book, but don't laugh, it was just for testing :). After incorporating an option-driven (radio-buttons) selection of the database platform and choosing the corresponding connection handle I found out that after the first hit there was NO difference in speed either (did I mention that the code itself was the same for all 3?)