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For those cost-conscious users, you may want to explore the free Oracle Database 10g Express Edition.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database /xe/index.html

    Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) is an entry-level,
    small-footprint database based on the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 code base
    that's free to develop, deploy, and distribute; fast to download; and simple
    to administer.

It is absolutely free. It has certain size-restrictions but they should be enough for a lot of usages.

If you are keen on developing database-centric Web applications, you may want to try the free Oracle 10g Express Edition with Application Express. Application Express (formerly known as HTML DB) is a RAD platform tightly integrated with the database.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database /xe/index.html

If you've ever read oracles policy on per processor license.
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/press/2005_dec/mul ticoreupdate_dec2005.html

You would see that it depends upon your architeture. For example when running on UltraSpac you pay for one processor for every 4 cores you have. AMD/Intel multicore you pay for every 2 cores you have. Either way they would have to sit down and devise a per processor license for you. Though you can always purchase per user instead of per processor. This would probably be the best route if your runnings hundreds or thousands of processors.

Just when Oracle Secure Enterprise Search had the Google "look and feel" copied...

Demo of the Oracle SES here.

Just when Oracle Secure Enterprise Search had the Google "look and feel" copied...

Demo of the Oracle SES here.

I agree that no one ever should pay that; however, that is what Oracle EE is still listed at on a per-processor basis:

http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpSctDs pRte.jsp?section=11468

The real problem with people blithely throwing around $40k/proc is that it covers a single case for the Oracle database server, analogous to quoting the price of Windows as $4,000 -- after all, that's the price of Windows 2003 Data Center Edition.

Oracle has solutions at several price points with increasing capacity. People act like that's a bad thing.

Other points:

Oracle has been free for development use for years.

Oracle "Express Edition (XE)" is "free to develop, deploy, and distribute" and "can be installed on any size host machine with any number of CPUs, ... will store up to 4GB of user data, use up to 1GB of memory, and use one CPU on the host machine."

Sometimes people choose open-source for the wrong reasons. There is always a myth that open-source is good. But look at Google. Do they open their sources? No. But everybody uses -- not because it is open-source but because it is good and free. Even if they open their sources, how many people outside of
Google can understand their search technology to handle it? They really don't need to open their sources. Instead, they just need to make their platform available for developers and hackers build stuff on. In fact, it is more often the second-tier softwares which try to open their sources with a hope to gain acceptance in the market.

So people don't really need open source. What they truly concern is the cost. That's why Postgres SQL or MySQL were attractive. There is no more reason for those users to choose Postgres SQL or MySQL because Oracle has also made its database available for free for any use -- Oracle 10g Express Edition
(Oracle 10g XE). It is the same database technology as its enterprise-level database at zero cost.

Check out Oracle 10g XE at http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database /xe/index.html

moded you insightful.

THe decision is easier than you think, aside for what you said thsoe Oracle brainpower people are going to be "Oracle certified engineers" or the equivalent, asking for $100K a year because they have a half baked "engineer certificate" that they bought with a $2,000 exam.
I am really pissed off of those so called "engineers" Technicians...

Now if Oracle would only certify ocfs2 for use by Oracle databases!

According to Oracle's own OCFS2 doc:. OCFS2 certification with Oracle 10g Release 2 RAC on Linux x86, x86-64, Itanium and Power is currently in progress.

Kindof makes you wonder.

...which is why Oracle has released Oracle XE. It is not open source, but it does compete on price (free).

It's quite fantastic.

Where are the analytic functions??

Even better, here is the link to the product download page: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database /sql_developer/index.html

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/press/2006_mar/031 306-sql-developer-finalsite.html Linking to the the actual site of the company, imagine that!

http://www.oracle.com/applications/suites.html#OEB S

a bit more than just accounting.

On the AMD side, dual-core may become more common than single core, very shortly. The fact that dual-core chips are drop-in replacements for single core chips helps, as vendors don't have to change anything other than their CPU order.

Unless the publishers of popular proprietary programs start billing customers per core. Microsoft isn't planning on charging dual-core customers more, but Oracle treats a dual-core CPU as 1.5 billing units.

Oracle is currently on version 11.5.10 of it's ERP system. You might want to Google Oracle e-Business Suite or Oracle Applications before casting them off as a n00b in the field.

http://www.oracle.com/applications/home.html/

The article says Oracle compares its US$15G/yr revenue to MySQL's US$30M/yr. But as Paul Graham says, it is OK to shrink a US$30G/yr industry to US$30M/yr, if your absolute share of the new US$30M is bigger than the one on US$30G was. Or in other words, MySQL will laugh to the bank on growing from US$30M, while Oracle will strive to keep their US$15G.

Also, IBM, Oracle and Intel did not make Linux. Richard Stallman created GNU, Linus used GNU and complemented it with Linux, and now IBM, Oracle and Intel help Linus with Linux and RMS with GNU.

I wonder how long will IBM and Oracle continue think they can sell proprietary servers on free platforms, without facing significant competition from free servers too. And how long Intel think they can sell proprietary machines to run free software without facing competition from free (think 'open') hardware? Now they are winning, IBM and Oracle using GNU/Linux to face competition from Microsoft, and Intel to crush proprietary RISC (think they ignoring OpenFirmware); but how long before we are running PostgreSQL (or better yet, Rel) on some OpenCores system booting with OpenFirmware or something the like? Not on the short term, for sure, but eventually maybe it is inevitable, unless DRM forces us into a police state.

I guess Oracle appears to know what you are talking about:

"Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) is an entry-level, small-footprint database based on the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 code base that's free to develop, deploy, and distribute; fast to download; and simple to administer."

And Microsoft too, kinda:

"We originally announced pricing of Visual Studio Express at US$49. We are now offering Visual Studio Express for free, as a limited-in-time promotional offer, until November 6, 2006. Note that we are also offering SQL Server 2005 Express Edition as a free download, and that this offer is not limited to the same promotional pricing period as Visual Studio Express."

I guess "Express" is some kind of magic phrase:

"With DB2 Express-C, faculty and students have direct access to an easy to learn and easy to use database for relational and XML data at no charge."

I don't think it's in these vendors' best interests to have such high bars to entry for the worker either.

Oracle Application Express Tutorial: Building an Issue Tracking System

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database /application_express/tutorials.html

Application Express is included in the Oracle Database 10g Express Edition.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database /xe/index.html

Oracle Application Express Tutorial: Building an Issue Tracking System

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database /application_express/tutorials.html

Application Express is included in the Oracle Database 10g Express Edition.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database /xe/index.html

Oracle also has a multi-platform product - Oracle Calendar - that is part of their Collaboration Suite (which includes email, calendaring, PDA sync, etc...). It's not free, but Oracle has fairly generous licensing terms for schools. They also offer it in a hosted environment for low monthly fees. It'll do everything you want and more, and they are constantly working on providing enhanced support for applications that are part of the respective operating systems.

I don't understand how Oracle can possibly eliminate open-source software. Forking it is not a drawn-out process - it's as easy as copying the current source into a different subversion/CVS server if necessary, and going on from there. That's assuming that Oracle would even try to prevent the direct continuation of the existing development process. And even if they wanted to, could they legally change the license?

What if they just want to get some more revenue by offering paid support for BDB? Sleepycat has been profitable for a long time now.

Maybe Oracle fears their own product could become irrelevant in certain markets, and they want to diversify.

Here they come right out and say that BDB complements their existing product line, and they will continue to develop and support it, and they do not plan to change the license.

I'm not sure exactly how good this deal will be for Oracle, but I think y'all are getting pretty carried away with the conspiracy theories. Seems to me it will continue to be business as usual for anybody (commercial or not) who's using BDB.

I also continue to wonder why MySQL is so much more popular than PostgreSQL (or is it still so much more popular?) I like PostgreSQL better because there are no questions about it being 100% free software, and it has had advanced features for such a long time already that MySQL is only recently getting around to implementing. If people feel icky about having Oracle associated in this indirect way, it's just one more reason to switch.

Diversity? It looks more like careening towards homogeneity to me.

I should point out that the Slashdot editor changed my words while leaving them attributed to me.

I said nothing about diversity. My original quote was "Having previously acquired Innobase, what does the future hold for these open-source databases?" The editor changed the end of the sentence to "Oracle is certainly taking a look at diversity." -- those weren't my words, despite remaining inside the quotes.

But hey, I got a submission accepted, and that's always nice! :-)

Oracle did that for a reason, and it's not because they like to collect database companies.

For big compagnies that now use oracle that is a good enough reason to stay using the expense oracle database (or the recent free XE edition. Switching to one of the free db backaneds (inno/libdb) does not change the dependabilty on oracle so why would one change for that reason?

Your reason are still valid for mysql user, but for oracle users it is good to stay at oracle in the long run since oracle seems to collect all of the free alternatives.

In that vein, OCFS2 should do exactly what you would like from a FS. It is easier to set up than RAW/ASM, and if configured properly, it can be rock solid. There are good resources available for installing and configuring.

Evaluation copies of Oracle have been freely downloadable for years:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products /database/oracle10g/

I haven't seen anyone mention one thing yet: Oracle XE.

This is a free database with most of Oracle's enterprise functionality. It will hold giant amounts of data, it has full XML support, and it will run on a developer's machine if needed.

Free (beer) DB2: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/db2/udb/db2ex press/

Free (beer) SQL Server: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/editions/express/defa ult.mspx

Now what?

I'm not sure about DB2, but with regards to Oracle, it's not correct to think of it as just a database. If you are, then you probably shouldn't be running it as there are cheaper alternatives. Oracle bundles a gigantic stack of technologies: JVM, LDAP, geo-spatial, content management, text search, RDBMS, etc. Here's the documentation library for Oracle 9i; it's massive.

What about OCFS and OCFS2?

What about OCFS and OCFS2?

Indeed.

First of all, you are all up in my grill, postin' some lame shiznit 'bout wanting to run some pi-sizzled games on a Mac. Then you come outta nowhere with some SQL Server stuff.

So I pimp-slapped with some O-to-the-Rackel, and now y'all come back some weakness, talkin' 'bout you gots no cash for a database. You givin' me some line about no cash when I bet you're rollin's on 22s, pushin' up on the honeys in a fine ride, but you're gonna act like you can't pay The Big E.

Nerdie, please.

Did I not send you a link to download a free copy of Oracle for Mac OS X server?

Are you hating the game?

Don't front on me...

Anyways I can't be mad at you... we's cool.. but just so's you know... I know you're frontin', 'cause we both know the Mac can do enterprise: J2EE (even WebLogic),

Of course, if you just want to player-hate the Mac, be my guest. But I hope you realize that most of the compelling open source software also runs on Mac OS X, right?

...but I once had a somewhat bizarre set of circumstances that led to me downloading and using Oracle's JDeveloper. It really wasn't too bad, I liked it much better than NetBeans (what's up with "mount points", anyway?), although I still prefer Eclipse. And it's free-as-in-beer, so all it'll cost you is some time to download and install it. I've also heard nice things about TopLink, but I haven't looked into it.

But let me know when I can download thousands of pirated games that run on Mac OS X.

Also, someone please let him know when he can download thousands of anti-spyware/trojan/virus packages to run with his pirated games.

Or let me know when I can run SQL Server 2000 or something comparable in power and flexibility on Mac OS X.

Ummm... okay, here's Oracle for OS X. Or maybe you prefer Sybase Adaptive Enterprise Server? Or if you want something free, but enterprise quality there's PostgreSQL. Or something free, flexible and fast that's decent enough to power slashdot there's mysql.

SQL Server is decent for small to medium-sized databases, but you're not going to be handling tables mesured in gigabytes in SQL server like in sybase, db2, or oracle. Not unless Microsoft really puts a lot more work into SQL Server and the memory management of Windows itself.

Can't say about the pirated games.
About SQL Server 2000...
How about MySQL: http://developer.apple.com/internet/opensource/osd b.html
or better still, Oracle: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/macos/index. html

A lot of stuff that you can do on Linux, you can do on Mac.

All the reasons that I had to use Linux on by beigebox went out the window when I got my Mac.

What are yours, other than what you've stated above?

IntelliJ IDEA is available for a free 30 day trial. Just download it and try it out, and you should be able to answer your own question. I did and decided that while IDEA is good, Eclipse has more compelling price:performance.

There are other free options as well:
Oracle JDeveloper
Borland JBuilder

And maybe a few others if you search Google for "free Java IDE".

So now Sun is taking on .NET and they're teaming up with Oracle for it ? What a load of nonsense. According to Sun themselves the whole partnership is almost entirely based on Oracle choosing Solaris 10 as their preferred platform. You can read more about that here.

IMO some "reporters" only read what they want to read. Sun already has Java and it has got quite a big foothold to last. Solaris 10 is also kicking some serious ass. Why on earth would they want to directly confront a company like MS when they can easily expand their own market and slowly strengthen their position ? IMVHO the big competitor for Sun is Linux at this time. Something clearly displayed when looking at Novell which almost immediatly started "OpenSuSE" after the release of OpenSolaris. Coincedence? I wonder...

This step has IMO nothing to do with .NET, and if you take the effort to skim the Sun news articles I'm sure you'd conclude the same. What about this: Linux with either MySQL or Postgres vs. Solaris 10 with Oracle, or MySQL/Postgres if you so prefer. And all based on almost the same price / options.

Utopia? Then why is Oracle also jumping on the "opening up some products" bandwagon ?

No, I don't think MS has much to worry, Sun is targeting another audience here.

Regardless of the exploit taken, if the DB is properly configured and secured the only "lost" of data should be against the schema being attacked. And then you can use Oracle's Flashback technology to roll back that one transaction - if caught in time.

True loss of data means the DBA did not do their job. Of course, this is usually, in my experience anyway, the fault of managment and the business - budget/time/resources.

Sure you can.

In addition to that, what software company (Like Great Plains, People Soft, SAS)

Well...MS now owns Great Plains.
SAS? Install Center: SAS for Linux®.
PeopleSoft? Owned by Oracle, who does support Linux.

They support Mac OS X server dont they?

If you're not going to have a lot of named users, the named users licensing is definately a lot cheaper, at $149, $300, and $800 per-user respectively.

If you're not going to have a lot of named users, the named users licensing is definately a lot cheaper, at $149, $300, and $800 per-user respectively.

If you're not going to have a lot of named users, the named users licensing is definately a lot cheaper, at $149, $300, and $800 per-user respectively.

> Ever heard of S.A.M.E.?
> http://otn.oracle.com/deploy/availability/pdf/oow2 000_same.pdf
> It's trivial to implement Mysql or Postgresql on top of S.A.M.E.

SAME (Stripe and Mirror Everything) trades off hardware costs for labor: you end up with twice as much storage as you really need. Further, it works better with expensive heavily-cached storage such as EMC, IBM Shark, etc rather than low-cost direct attached. Sometimes that's a good deal - if you really can't get a good dba, it's probably a safe choice.

On the flip side, it's just plain expensive and you seldom get to really buy as much storage as you'd like. I've often spoke with people who've had to implement SAME on top of insufficient hardware - since they couldn't get approval for all that they needed, or outgrew their initial configuration and were waiting for the budget to buy a lot more.

In my opinion SAME is fine if you have a small & simple little database. But anything worth benchmarking deserves an intelligent compromise. My data warehouse (db2) has two sets of arrays: fast and slow. Each has their own set of dedicated disk adapters.
    - the slow set of arrays are each configured with raid5 on top of 10k rpm drives. Data, backups, etc are stored here.
    - the fast set of arrays are each configured with raid10 on top of 15k rpm drives. The temp space and log files are stored here.
    - eventually, I'll add a second set of fast arrays to hold indexes, small dimension tables, small summary tables, and possibly current-only detail data. This could go into the same pool as the existing fast arrays holding temp & logs, but performance will probably suffer - since those two sets of data are almost guaranteed to be used simultaneously.

Note that the fast drives cost almost exactly *twice* what the slow drives cost. By splitting the data up this way we've saved about $50k. On a single server.

No, i'm not really interested in seeing benchmarks in which people try to save pennies by buying mysql to then blow it on excessive hardware costs.

Ever heard of S.A.M.E.?

http://otn.oracle.com/deploy/availability/pdf/oow2 000_same.pdf

It's trivial to implement Mysql or Postgresql on top of S.A.M.E.

These idiots...

Oracle
http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/xml/xmldb/in dex.html
Microsoft
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/dnsql90/html/sql2k5xmloptions.asp

you know, the ones that sell the most databases today. Not to mention just about every other successful commerically sold database.

>> stupid 2 teh maxx0rz

Very cogent and convincing.

This is Martha how the heck did you do it? You don't even know how to decorate, your web site is way too drab...and that is not a good thing!