Slashdot Mirror

Assuming you already know something about databases:

http://asktom.oracle.com/
http://tahiti.oracle.com/
http://metalink.oracle.com/

Tom Kyte's books
Cary Millsap's books
Oracle Press books
The Oracle Concepts Guide from tahiti above for your version
comp.databases.oracle.server (watch out, there are some bigheads)

And you can download and run a full-blown Oracle setup on your own for free, as long as it's for learning.

There are lots of crap books and bad advice out there; concentrate on understanding from the above first so you can spot those.

Do backups. Use RMAN. Test backups.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/2day_dba/inde x.html

There are several different options for relational databases, and despite what the slashdot community thinks, MySQL isn't necessarily the right one.

Let's first assume that you're devoted to the Oracle platform. Oracle has some nice advantages compared to some of the other RBDMS. It handles triggers very well, it supports a java based client for end user applications (programmed via PL/SQL), and it's damned fast (when it's setup up very well). Notably, you will need a dedicated Oracle server with pretty robust specs fi you want it to run well.

Now, a brief comparison of other products in case you are not devoted to Oracle.

Access is relatively cheap and easy to use if you're not going to be doing a lot concurrent operations on the DB.

MySQL is one of the most efficient databases I've worked with in terms of speed, assuming you've got a well normalized database. You can also run MySQL from a nondedicated machine for quite some time before you need a dedicated box (your results may vary). MySQL does have some limitations, though.

As best as I can tell, MS SQL Server runs pretty well, but seems like an oversized version of Access. This can be a good or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it. It does offer decent performance, an easy user interface, and it's a Microsoft product, which of course comes with positives and negatives.

There's also IBM's DB2 platform which (last I used it) had a fast db engine, and a horribly slow front end.

Wikipedia has a nice article that distinguishes between the different RDBMS out there. If you haven't yet picked a platform, I would suggest that you start there.

There are several things you can do, once you've picked a RDBMS, however, your best approach is to learn SQL. SQL is pretty standard amongst the DB engines, and if you can use it well, you'll be golden. This has been my favorite reference manual, although I must it admit if you're first learning SQL, the reading is quite dry. I would also recommend that you find a good resource for whichever database engine you end up using, because each of them has specific functions and keywords that you might need to look up from time to time.

Finally, one last question, if you don't mind me asking... If you've got a computer science background, why don't you have a good basic understanding of RDBMS? I mean, when it comes down to it they're all basically the same. Maybe I'm wrong, but it makes me wonder...

Consequentially, if you're boss is willing to hire me, I might just be looking for a job. :)

Oracle is, for the most part, a SQL-compliant database at its core. So, you'll want to get a good handle on basic SQL first, then you can sign up for the Oracle Technical Network to get access to the Oracle-specific documentation at <http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/da tabase10gr2.html>. There are probably Oracle-specific commands that you will find useful for your specific geospatial data.

When I learned SQL I used the book "The Practical SQL Handbook" by Bowman, Emerson and Darnovsky. It was very readable, used meaningful examples, and presented the topics in an appealing order. I've recommended it to two or three others during my career and they liked the book, too.

I learned Oracle when I was 14 years old. It's a free download, after all, and there are literally gigabytes of reference documentation available on http://otn.oracle.com./ Plus, large Barnes and Noble stores have an dizzying array of books on Oracle, usually a whole shelf full.

What exactly did you learn while receiving your "solid computer science background"? Certainly not how to learn something that isn't force-fed to you, it seems.

Tom's website is at http://asktom.oracle.com/

I've found it extremely useful for dealing with specific as well as general problems with Oracle.

But in general, if you know one RDBMS, then until you need specific features it's not too hard - I taught myself with the aid of the manuals and some experimentation. HTH

Dan

you can implement this scalable and redundant, it offers all services mentioned plus more. With this http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/cs/index .html you can also use the oracle database as datastore for all kinds of docs, effectively replacing fileservers. Don't forget things like backup & recovery ... I don't know how others think about this or have experiences with it but I think it worth some investigation. It has a price tag per user but with a full implementation it could be a nice price... http://homepage.mac.com/ik_zelf/oracle

Using PostgreSQL reduces the number of access licenses required for Oracle, or doesn't waste existing connections.

...why increase the risk of your development process by switching back and forth? Oracle is available under a free development license. You don't need to buy additional licenses to develop applications on Oracle, only to deploy them. You can have a completely separate Oracle install as a test base and you won't have to worry about switching back and forth from PL/SQL (or "recompiling," though it seems foolish to hard-code your SQL queries in C).

I am running MacOS X Panter and is using sql*plus native. I downloaded it from oracle technet as part of the oracle 9 db kit, works like a charm. Technet require reqistration but it is free and spam-free and give access to lots of developer goodies. If you are a professional Oracle developer/user I am surprised you did not know of this.

http://www.oracle.com/technology//index.html
(strange url but...)

Good luck
Björn

If you're an Oracle shop, you might want to investigate this one.

Yes, I realize that that free solutions exist, but some organizations are willing to/prefer to go with commercial software solutions.

Rebuilding indexes every few days is not necessairily a good idea. A very tightly packed index will require extra IO to do inserts, while one that has 'spread out' a bit due to use will be faster. Ask Tom had an article about this for Oracle. A nice quote is 'No, there are no times when a scheduled rebuild of all indexes is "good".'

not-so-Surprisingly a discussion on .NET and without a proper definition of the technology on /.!

> http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/hull _asp.html
> http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/columns/hull_ php2.html

Gist - Comparing it with PHP is not really proper.

not-so-Surprisingly a discussion on .NET and without a proper definition of the technology on /.!

> http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/hull _asp.html
> http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/columns/hull_ php2.html

Gist - Comparing it with PHP is not really proper.

http://www.oracle.com/oramag/oracle/01-may/o31linu x.html

or

http://www.oracle.com/oramag/profit/01-feb/p11linu x.html

http://www.oracle.com/oramag/oracle/01-may/o31linu x.html

or

http://www.oracle.com/oramag/profit/01-feb/p11linu x.html

Seems like product support to me: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products /database/oracle10g/index.html You can buy a media pack and a license from the store: http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpItmDs pRte.jsp?a=b&item=643238

Seems like product support to me: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products /database/oracle10g/index.html You can buy a media pack and a license from the store: http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpItmDs pRte.jsp?a=b&item=643238

Yahoo employ Rasmus Lerdorf. He is the author of PHP. They use a lot of front end servers. See here for an architecture discussion.

I do believe Oracle is starting to support the OSX server line...

I've not played with it yet...but, could be interesting.

He lies not!

Proof.

Holy crap. Go Oracle.

That logic is extremly flawed...

Go to Oracle and click on download and they will give you the complete, uncrippled version of the database for whatever platform you like. Still, Oracle is making good money off the database that is available for free. If what you said was true, Oracle would not seel a single database, would they?

> ...that OS X is simply not ready for enterprise-class server applications.
Huh? Not sure if I agree with you on that point:

JBoss
Sybase
Oracle
backup

That doesn't even cover directory services integration, messaging, development, file serving, and a slew of other applications...

Considering that the M$ environment is under constant pressure from various threats I would like to call the selection of that environment risky, and almost stupid. By selecting other environments you would be running the risk of being more dependent on a few persons with that particular competence. On the other hand the number of persons competent enough to cause trouble will also decrease significantly.

If I was involved I would have selected OpenVMS , now owned by HP as operating system for the servers running either MySQL or Oracle as a database and developing the software in Ada or (horrendous thought) Pascal or maybe Java.

---
OpenVMS - The OS with longer uptimes than Microsoft support policies

Oracle has an amazing web conferencing product that integrates with existing phone services through a voice-XML gateway to provide voice services. It allows application and screen sharing, intermeeting IM, polls, you can convert microsoft office documents to HTML for sharing in a browser on the fly. Also, if you're already an oracle shop, it integrates very well with oracle internet directory and single-sign on environments. The archiving and logging features are excellent. If your not an oracle shop however, it is a bit of a pain in the ass to setup. The web conferencing comes with their collaboration suite, but you can probably get it stand alone as well. The licenses are free for external users (non-employee) so you just have license your company's employees who intend to use it. Here's a link http://www.oracle.com/collabsuite/feature_imeeting .html

Now if they would only open source Netscape calendaring...

Did RedHat get rights to Netscape Calendar? I thought that was all sold to Steltor as Steltor CorporateTime before it all got gobbled-up by Oracle and became Oracle Collaboration Suite's Oracle Calendar. The only reason I know this is because my company was a legacy Steltor CorporateTime customer and we recently completed an upgrade to Oracle Calendar as support was about to expire on the Steltor product.

If Netscape Calenedar was open-sourced, perhaps I could better-understand the proprietary database backend used with it.

My experience would suggest that there are a lot of people using distributed RPC mechanisms to achieve utility computing and distributed work. However, my experience also encompasses Grid computing, and the sad fact is that cluster computing in the Grid seems to be limited to running 'nohup' on multiple machines.

Oh, and there so is Oracle on OpenVMS ;-)

This?

see http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/intermed ia/index.html (oracle)
This document was written in 2002 (and that version is as old too)
I can remember some sales guy saying "You can look for a couch that's like this one. But blue."
So that means it should do a bit more than just color patches..
and then there is Google images..

Try getting Oracle to run on OS X server.

Been there. Done that. :)

http://oss.oracle.com/projects/endpoint/ - it turns a linux machine into a SBP-2 endpoint.

see http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/macos/index. html for Oracle's page.

Similarly, for ... business applications, enterprise servers ... you won't go wrong with Windows.

Why can't the community get togeather and create an open API like Microsofts Direct-X?

In any event, you don't usually play games on enterprise Linux distributions. So your post is rather out of place here.

I would say Linux is that OS. But it really needs support from the entertainment gaming industry to push is public support to the masses.

(And if your sarcasm detector needs some calibration, click on some of the links I gave before you post a comment based on my comment ...)

Not. As an application developer, you simply don't notice the DMA issue as far as app development goes. Yet the customer may notice a performance tradeoff sooner of later.

... Intel is shipping 10x the x86-64 volume AMD does.

The question is, are all these Intel CPUs actually used with 64 bit applications. See, people buying Opteron boxes buy them because they want to explicitly run 64 bit apps on Linux, e.g. for compute clusters where Opteron rack servers sell like sliced bread. Intel EM64T boxes are bought although most people still run 32 bit OSes and apps on them, mainly because very few windows applications are available in x86_64 versions right now.

So Intel may claim to be the market leader as far as shipping volumes but not as far as uses. The main reason Intel can claim to be the market leader here is that most customers always tend to buy the fastest GHz CPUs that are available, and these happen to be EM64T in machines like the IBM x346 or the HP DL380G4, which are pretty much the mainstream in data center applications.

Wide spread deployment of x86-64 production envrionments is still a few quarters out. Fact is it is not quite ready for prime time.

Uh - what the heck am I missing here? Check this page and this page and tell me for which OS x86_64 support is available, and give me a rough guess for which OS not. Sure as hell, Oracle 10g does not run on EM64T CPUs on Microsoft Windoze in 64 bit mode. For now, you need to buy an Itanium box to do that (and Itanium sales in 2004 is an entirely different story). What a pity. What did you say about prime time?

Perhaps if you could tell us why you thought Eclipse and Netbeans suck it would be easier to come with a suggestion?

Anyway, some of the most popular would probably be JBuilder, JDeveloper, IntelliJ IDEA, KDevelop...

If you prefer more light-weight IDEs, you can always use ANT together with something like Emacs or JEdit.

JDeveloper is by Oracle, JBuilder is by Borland. JDeveloper is great but I prefer JBuilder. It's amazing how far it has come.

But what the heck did Larry Ellison smoke this morning? Larry, go read your own web page, look which platform makes the fastest growth for you at the moment, and think it over again.

Or EMC - why did you buy VMware to begin with, if you think that the ESX server base OS does not scale, and is insecure? Oh you added your own patches? Okay - where is the source code, and how about forks?

Hey Cisco, do you have a problem with Asterisk in the upcoming VoIP hype?

And Sun... well they advertise SUSE Linux and Red Hat Linux on their web page, but I didn't expect these free riders to actually *support* Linux. These folks turn any discussion from Linux as a teaser to Slowaris x86 within a wink of the eye. The fork discussion is particularly interesting. As far as I remember, it was not Sun Microsystems who prevented the UNIX fork from happening in the 80s and 90s, despite all the XPG4's, SPEC1170's, Single UNIX Specifications and all these other marketing smoke grenades. "McNealy ... finally announced he won the battle and had the one surviving Unix out there." Scott, go sleep again. Or get sued by SCO because they allegedly own Unix.

Scalability problems is a nice thing. Go read the top500.org list, see what OSses are at the top, and come back then. Hint: it's not Microsoft Windows, and it's not Solaris, especially not the system on rank 2 (has anybody ever seen a 10000+ CPU cluster even *boot* Sloaris or Windows?). The top 10 were not built by EDS, EMC or anybody else on this list. There is *one* Windows system on the list - the entry is 15 months old and fell from rank 84 to 194 within one year. Apparently, nobody dared to run another Windows HPC benchmark ever since. The fastest Sun machine is on rank 31, and guess what, it's not an UltraSPARC box, and did it run Solaris? So far for scalability. BTW: The fastest UltraSPARC machine is on rank 32, and it's not a Sun box, but from Fujitsu-Siemens. Watch your six, there is an Alpha machine behind you!

They assume their customers are deaf, dumb, and blind. Disgusting.

Oracle's Linux commitment began in 1998 with the first commercial database on Linux. Today, Oracle is the only major software vendor to provide first-line support for Red Hat and Novell/SUSE. All Oracle products are available on Linux and Oracle Database on Linux has met the Common Criteria Standard at EAL4, the highest industry security level for commercial software. Gartner Dataquest says Oracle is #1 on Linux with 360% growth.

Fastest benchmark result on four processors running Linux

On an HP Integrity rx4640 with four Intel Itanium 2 1.6GHz processors running Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3, Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition achieved: World record four processor performance on Linux of 161,217 tpmC (transactions per minute) A price-performance ratio of $3.94/tpmC. Oracle, the first and only database provider to demonstrate TPC-C performance leadership on Linux, now holds more TPC-C world records on Linux than any other vendor. This latest benchmark result further demonstrates Oracle's commitment to delivering exceptional performance and reducing the total cost of ownership for all business needs.

Oracle's Linux commitment began in 1998 with the first commercial database on Linux. Today, Oracle is the only major software vendor to provide first-line support for Red Hat and Novell/SUSE. All Oracle products are available on Linux and Oracle Database on Linux has met the Common Criteria Standard at EAL4, the highest industry security level for commercial software. Gartner Dataquest says Oracle is #1 on Linux with 360% growth.

Fastest benchmark result on four processors running Linux

On an HP Integrity rx4640 with four Intel Itanium 2 1.6GHz processors running Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3, Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition achieved: World record four processor performance on Linux of 161,217 tpmC (transactions per minute) A price-performance ratio of $3.94/tpmC. Oracle, the first and only database provider to demonstrate TPC-C performance leadership on Linux, now holds more TPC-C world records on Linux than any other vendor. This latest benchmark result further demonstrates Oracle's commitment to delivering exceptional performance and reducing the total cost of ownership for all business needs.

Large enterprises should not use Windows because it is not secure enough, has scalability problems, and is controlled by a single vendor so it's not even *possible* to fork, should you need to.

Note that Dell and Oracle and Sun all have webpages describing their enterprise Linux support. If they were really concerned about Linux not being up to snuff, they probably shouldn't be offering it to their customers.

Good article from all the way back in 2004 regarding where this is actually pointed. http://www.crn.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=510 00391&flatPage=true

Would Sun rather see Linux go away? Sure, but they also believe in it enough to sell it. http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v20z/index.jsp

These are quotes directly from they guy heading up EDS's strategic alliances. Not from members of the strategic alliance - has anyone asked Ellison if he thinks Linux is insecure, prone to unfriendly forking? Guess not. http://www.oracle.com/events/unbreakablelinux/inde x.html. Guess not.

Cisco? Well lets see they have linux running on some of their hardware, and apparently its good enough for their engineers to run http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2005/0216cislinux.htm l

So lets round out the list...

EMC - http://www.emc.com/products/systems/linux/index.js p
Dell - http://linux.dell.com/
Microsoft - http://www.mslinux.org/ Err, umm - ok maybe not.

Try this for firewire emulation by a Linux box.

I haven't tried it, but it is the only solution to allow "device" emulaton for x86 computers that I've found.

Not hardly.
Oracle SE One Database - $149 per user. Dell will sell you a server plus database pre-installed for about $5500.
2004 Ferrari Modena : $150K and up.

i used WhiteBoxLinux.. as i couldnt get RHEL3 which was certified for running Oracle 11i Ebusiness suite http://www.oracle.com/applications/index.html. It worked gr8. it served well for our testing purposes.

For a long time I have had (occasionally heated) arguments with SQL addicts who insist that almost everything about an application should be coded in SQL and stored procedures. Meanwhile I have been moving all my logic away from the database engine, using APIs such as Java Data Objects, which makes my code very rapidly portable between databases.

Tom Kyte is of course not a disinterested observer, but his opinion based on 20 years of experience is that he can re-implement an application in (say) DB2 faster than you can move your "portable" business logic to a new platform - and the result will be 2 systems each faster, more scalable, and more secure than your portable system. Which is pretty much my experience with every "platform independent" package I have worked with.

Which doesn't even touch on the topic of data integrity...

sPh

Mac OS X is a BSD system, so you have access to the wide variety of Unix-ish open source software. Whatever your favorite language is, if there's a BSD interpreter/compiler/whatever, it probably also runs on OS X.

Apple gives away free development tools. GCC is the base compiler on Mac OS X. XCode is a development environment that can do pretty much everything. I also highly recommend Shark from the free CHUD package (check out the Celestia optimization tutorial). It makes wonders when it comes to analyzing your app's performance problems.

Oracle 10g was recently released for Mac OS X Server (download here).

There are also zillions of OSS packages that work on OS X (check out DarwinPorts and Fink for example).

Only harder and less user-friendly. I'm sure for java programmers this seems easy. My typical audience is Excel users who know practically nothing about programming.
Oracle HTML DB Quick Tour.

do you have any idea as far as how many security vulnerabilities exist for oracle 8.1.7.2? Dude, I hope that the only ip address that the listener is configured for is 127.0.0.1. loadphp can crash your deal, and allow for takeover of the system. several iterations of remote vulnerabilities in the listener. several security alerts on the oracle executable. http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/security/a lerts.htm