My company is a MS shop. We use .NET and SQL Server on almost every project. It's the standard development environment that we keep.

So of course, we have a client that wants an Oracle backend.

So all day yesterday I was tripping over the differences between SQL Server (and Transact-SQL) and Oracle.

And there's a lot of little things that one can trip over. Such as:

• Using := instead of = for assignments
• Packages (and the @ command to run them)
• That whole output from Stored Procedures thing
• Using END IF rather than BEGIN/END around IF logic blocks
• ELSIF rather than ELSE IF

And those are just the ones off the top of my head. I think what makes it the worst is the fact that ultimately they are so close to one another. It's like the difference between Java and C++. There's just enough similarities in the syntax to confuse you when you're switching back and forth between them.

Oh well, it's back to writing stored procedures for me.