I know that Oracle is a generally good database engine but I think it is too difficult in deployment for a .NET projects comparing with native Microsoft SQL server solutions.
(I needed to install both x32- and x64-bit client components and configure TNS names for both of them, plus install Distributed Transactions support for Oracle. Not saying that you need to register with Oracle in order to get those binaries.)
Still I’ve seen some .NET projects with Oracle.
What are the benefits in using Oracle over SQL Server? Any specific scenarios where it is the only choice?
Would you use Oracle for your .NET project?
I’ll start with this: The choice of DB engine for performance makes no difference this side of billions of rows: it comes down to code quality and database design. With billions of rows, your storage/SAN/network/BCP planning is paramount.
From a general ease of deployment and support it would be SQL Server; there are no cons here.