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Are you advertising for Oracle RAC? :-)
Check out the Linux benchmarks.

However, based on MS's past behaviours, I think we can look forward to a "good enough" replacement for PeopleSoft to be built into the next version of Windows. MS will forbid OEM's to remove it because they don't want a "confusing user experience." Oh, and it will increase the "Microsoft tax" on your new PC that you were only going to load Linux on.

You have no idea what business PeopleSoft is in do you?

PeopleSoft makes Enterprise Resource Planning software. Microsoft has very little to compete in this segment of business. The big king here is SAP, the German ERP software maker that has 29% of the market. Oracle has bought PeopleSoft after 18 months of intense and hostile negotiation. Microsoft is eyeing PeopleSoft customers for it's Microsoft Business Solutions productline - which is hardly competition in near future.

Have they started letting people trademark simple words now?

All software downloads are free, and each comes with a development license that allows you to use full versions of the products only while developing and prototyping your applications. You can buy Oracle products with full-use licenses at any time from the online Oracle Store or from your Oracle sales representative.

You can develop to your heart's content for free. Be prepared for a difficult installation experience, however. Oracle installs, on Linux especially, are no fun. Once it's running, though, it's great.

1) go to Oracle's Technet
2) sign up for free account
3) download whatever you want

Have fun!

One guru could support a small company on a database. One guy would not be able to provide enterprise level support for one database.
Perhaps your definition of enterprise is "a 8 person law firm". Mine, OTOH, is something like a $500M+ public company that could lose thousands of dollars a minute on downtime.
If that's my thousands of dollars a minute, I certainly wouldn't be stupid enough to only hire one person, much less some wanna be support company.

Instead, I would hire a company with:

a plan ( http://www.mysql.com/company/ ) or
a proven track record ( http://www.oracle.com/customers/partners/index.htm l )
or, at the very least, one that my friends recommend.

The problem is that the way every other company out there would is just buying competency.
Oracle vs People Soft
You can read about how bad it's this would hurt competition at Miscrosoft-CNet. and this guys at Microsoft know about they are talking.

We've been playing with some database technology at work that would let you do something similar, provided you can get the real-time traffic data feeds - thanks to the horsepower of Oracle Spatial and MapViewer.

I checked Oracle's web site. It appears that existing PeopleSoft customers have some good news out of this. After having invested millions of dollars on PeopleSoft, they won't have to immediately migrate to another ERP system:

Of course, whether or not PeopleSoft version 9 is an improvement over PeopleSoft version 8 depends on how much you love your existing ERP system. Of course, I don't see anything on whether or not the new PeopleSoft version 9 will run on DB2 or SQL Server.

Unless you were just playing around -- in which case, you're unlikely to be using Oracle because of the cost!

Actually, oracle would love for you to play around with their database, just ask them for it...

Buzz. It is public. The Oracle Licensing documents are available on the corp. website

Look at the Oracle DB licensing document. Additionally, look at the partitioning document for answers associated with soft and hard partitioning.

Of course, I expect this to change (esp. on Windows) p.d.q. given Microsoft's recent announcement.

Don't hold your breath.

ANd is Oracle and Sybase available on MacOSX?

Sybase Announces Availability of Enterprise RDBMS on MAC OS X Panther

Oracle Announces Plans to Make Oracle 10g Technology Available to Apple Developers. Oracle Database 10g Early Adopters Release 2 (10.1.0.3) for Apple Mac OS X

ANd is Oracle and Sybase available on MacOSX?

Sybase Announces Availability of Enterprise RDBMS on MAC OS X Panther

Oracle Announces Plans to Make Oracle 10g Technology Available to Apple Developers. Oracle Database 10g Early Adopters Release 2 (10.1.0.3) for Apple Mac OS X

I was interested to see how late/early oracle alligned with linux. This is what I found ~ 50 DEFINING MOMENTS: 30. Lining Up for Linux (October 1998)

• ...Anticipating the immense popularity of the new open source operating system, Linux, Oracle releases Oracle8 and Oracle Application Server 4.0 for Linux (Oracle8i for Linux will appear within several months). Demand for the new Linux products is indeed high--Oracle reports that more than 20,000 developers register for test copies of the Linux port of the database through the Oracle Technology Network () during the first two weeks of the product's release.

So you sceticism is founded :) I've found references to oracle and linux back to about '96 but nothing to suggest mainstream usage.

You also may want to check out the ASM (Automated Storage Manager). It only works for disks that Oracle manages, but it does some pretty cool automatic load-balancing and RAIDing.

Disclaimer:
Yes, I do work for ORCL.
No, I do not work on either OCFS or ASM (but I have partied with those guys :-)

You also may want to check out the ASM (Automated Storage Manager). It only works for disks that Oracle manages, but it does some pretty cool automatic load-balancing and RAIDing.

Disclaimer:
Yes, I do work for ORCL.
No, I do not work on either OCFS or ASM (but I have partied with those guys :-)

You also may want to check out the ASM (Automated Storage Manager). It only works for disks that Oracle manages, but it does some pretty cool automatic load-balancing and RAIDing.

Disclaimer:
Yes, I do work for ORCL.
No, I do not work on either OCFS or ASM (but I have partied with those guys :-)

Well, check out the Linux Oracle commercial and be amazed.

So whats up with Oracle and Linux?

Oracle will finish switching its 9,000-person in-house programming staff to Linux by the end of 2004, the database powerhouse said Wednesday.
In October, the company finished the Linux transition for the 5,000 programmers of its Oracle Applications software. Now the transformation has begun for those who work on the database product, said Wim Coekaerts, director of Linux engineering, in an interview at the CeBit trade show in New York.
"By the end of the year, (Linux) is our core platform," Coekaerts said. Oracle is switching because Linux systems are less expensive and faster, he added.

Oracle's Free (as in speech) software

If you saw Chuck Rozwat's LinuxWorld keynote (2 years ago, I think) you'll know that Oracle uses Linux PCs for its base development. Not just for "back-office apps", mind you, I mean a gigantic development environment with THOUSANDS of Linux PCs. The resulting inevitable patches to coreutils, etc, are all on the oss.oracle.com site above, as are Oracle's (GPLed) Clustered Filesystem.

Oracle's Free (as in speech) software

If you saw Chuck Rozwat's LinuxWorld keynote (2 years ago, I think) you'll know that Oracle uses Linux PCs for its base development. Not just for "back-office apps", mind you, I mean a gigantic development environment with THOUSANDS of Linux PCs. The resulting inevitable patches to coreutils, etc, are all on the oss.oracle.com site above, as are Oracle's (GPLed) Clustered Filesystem.

See this link.

You may not: use the programs for your own internal data processing or for any commercial or production purposes, or use the programs for any purpose except the development of a single prototype of your application;

Please tell me, how this product is comparable in terms of licencing to the SyBASE offering?

I fact, I've been waiting for free-download Oracle/DB2 "personal database" or some limited opensource release of Oracle/DB2 for a while.

I may be way off-base here, so apologies if I've missed the point, but Oracle have allowed free-downloads for at least a couple of years: Linux version of Oracle 10g.

Not free-as-in-speech, and if you want to deploy it commercially it's not even free-as-in-beer, but it does seem to meet your "personal database" criteria: it's the reason I've more Oracle experience[1] that SQL Server experience (though MSDE briefly threatned to change that - to some extent).

I'd need to check, but a few years back DB2 was also a free download, with the no-commercial-depolyment caveat. I'd be surpirsed if it still isn't; it's a neat trick to get developers hooked on cheap/free versions so that their organisations then migrate.

[1] Twice as much - a whole extra week ;)

What I found was that a lot of time was wasted on getting some of the more complex applications to work on it (e.g. Oracle 9i), while getting the same sw to run on something more 'standard', such as RedHat, was a bit easier.

Oracle client installations are really a pain in this case, as they require almost as much time and effort as a full-blown database install. I've experimented a little with their new Instant Client however, and it worked wonderfully on Debian (RPMs converted with alien).

For now, you only get client libraries (100MB!) and SQL*Plus though. Fortunately, after many requests Oracle will also release client headers with their next patch set, so we can compile DBD::Oracle and PHP support for Apache, etc. At least Oracle seems to be listening.

At best, IFS initially was a cheesy cluge that involved putting a SAMBA front-end on the DB, and it almost provides some of the features that we're talking about, via some custom application development. I was involved with the beta testing of the product with their developers (see my website for more information).

In no way was it a case of "WinFS was done before... look at IFS".

You are correct in that Oracle can read the content of certain files, and index those files for searching, but it is not effectively integrated into the OS; you couldn't just search from the OS itself... you had to open a web browser for it, or implement other applications.

And there's no way in HELL that my parents will be setting it up and using it on their home machine any time soon.

Just so you know, the main piece doing the heavy lifting is Oracle's Ultra Search engine (previously their Context engine), which allows you to do what you're talking about RIGHT NOW, IFS or not. That provides the ability to read the content of text-based files, or files of known/understood formats (PDF's, etc), and have the ability to perform context searches on it.

Last time I checked, it didn't let you assign search criteria to files it didn't understand (without some hacking/programming), or provide your own custom search tags, from within the OS/File System itself. All of those capabilities required application development and access.

Now, that being said, Oracle has taken IFS and rolled it into their Content Management SDK, that allows you to do a whole bunch of programming to do all the neat stuff that we're talking about, from an Application level, not the OS.

Once again, though, it is by NO means an OS level utility available "out of the box".

For that, I'll wait for the next release of OS X.

Crawl back into your hole, troll.

You can search any type of file supported by the text engine. That includes PDF/DOC/HTML/XML/etc. Your network users store data onto the "oracle" share and can hit a web page search to find it.

Because:

1) they are talking about Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), not the price of the software. TCO is hard to measure. It includes hiring flunkies and MS flunkies are cheaper than Linux flunkies. Of course, you need fewer.

2) you need more than the server OS, you need database, groupware, developer tools and workstations. While Linux is free, Oracle isn't.

3) supported Linux distros aren't free.

S

Hmm... supported by said zealots, like....

Like IBM ?
Like HP ?
Like Oracle ?
Like Novell ?

And primarily only used by zealots, like....

Like Amazon?
Like Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, and E*Trade?
Like Autozone and DaimlerChrysler?
Like the 60% of all websites, which are powered by open source software? (admittedly, some Apache servers run on commercial unix, freebsd, and some even run on windows).

Yep... a bunch of slashdot obsessed zealots, who only need to....

So I say, it's time to wake up and realize that what this guy is describing is accurate.

Yes, Daniel Lyons is mostly likely accurate in reporting that FACT that SCO claims to have discovered new evidence.

Wether Danial's OPINION, characterizing it as a "smoking gun", turns out to be an accurate remains to be seen. So far, Daniel Lyons, Laura Didio and Rob Enderle have "cried wolf" many times and not once has a so-called "smoking gun" turned out to be of any consequence. Maybe, just maybe, it will turn out to be important. Until then, perhaps you should "wake up and realize" that Danial, Laura and Rob are themselves zealots who've published many alarmist articles about the merits of SCO's case.

Even if SCO finally has found some evidence to support their case... which is a pretty big "if" considering the history of their performance to date, the impact on Linux of a contractual obligation regarding code released in AIX, but not in Linux, remains to be seen.

In the meantime, zealots here on slashdot, on groklaw, and at Forbes, Yankee group and Rob's one-man-show, the Enderle Group will make their predictions.

Verticle applications will be a different story, but there's very little that can run on LINUX that can't run on Solaris already. Never mind what gets written in Java.

Someone mentioned above that Oracle's groupware suite is among the best options for large installations -- perhaps something to consider. I understand that they have "Oracle Calendar Sync" available for PDA integration. Can't comment about their webmail.

BTW, I'm not recommending it by any means, but OpenGroupware supports drag-and-drop in the webmail client.

As DBA's I like to see stored procedures so I can gain a better understanding of how the application works. Depending on the application it may be easier to fix/improve a stored procedure rather than application code.

In reality, I don't think alot of people use stored procedures for inhouse applications. Alot of application vendors these days are trying to bypass database specific features for database portability. That may sound good but what you have then is an application that doesn't take advantage of the database which usually results in decreased performance.

For instance, Peoplesoft (if i'm wrong, someone please correct me) doesn't use sequences when its plugged into an Oracle database. Instead they use a table and when they require a unique value they lock the table, increment the appropriate row/column and unlock the table. This may be fine for a few users but for a mid-sized company locking issues are a major issue. Unfortunately for us this isn't addressed until the next version of peopletools and they seem to have an allergic reaction to backports.

The big reason for putting your SQL in the database is because most developers unfortunately don't understand how to write efficient and good SQL. If for instance, you have a PLSQL developer on your team (s)he will understand how to do this. Also, by using stored procedures you will be able to take advantage of all the database features.

Good Ask Tom article which sorta talks about this issue.

Unless your using a 'free' rdbms like mysql or postgresql a database system is a rather large investment. Your not going to be able to cutover to a new environment in a flash for reasons other than application dependence. If your company is anything like ours you have alot of $$ invested in training and experience. Its not a decision to take lightly.

One thing superid asks is In addition, you either have to have a dedicated T-SQL or PL/SQL coder who then is the weak link in your coding chain,. Like I mentioned above most developers can't write good/efficient SQL, so as long as your hired properly then your PL/SQL developer shouldn't be the weak link. (But don't get me started on hiring practices, most interviews are a joke and rarely ask difficult technical questions even for senior positions.)

The whole thing - filesystem as a DB - is complete crap. You can't do a bunch of fs operations in a single transaction and have ACID semantics on the transaction as a whole

When a file is marked for recovery unit journaling, a continuous history of the state of each record involved in a transaction is maintained in a journal until that transaction is completed.

While MySQL is an okay database, it's not a drop-in replacement for MS*SQL.

If you want to go for a closer one, try PostgreSQL. It's much more feature rich and stable than MySQL.

Of course, the best bet is Oracle which runs great on Linux.

Today, Oracle's price list is 11 pages of different price plans that would confuse a car dealership!

Oracle charges for cores individually. (see the Processor section)

Perhaps a compromise will result. Eventually a 2CPU license could entirely replace a single CPU license. At such a stage licenses could be bundled as 2CPU, 4CPU, etc. As multicores become the norm, naturally 1CPU licenses should phase out entirely.

This would allow companies to keep their per core licensing scheme. Customers would get the feeling of a deal by getting a muticore license. Perhaps the market would lower the cost of 2CPU license to what a single CPU would be worth.

HT is another matter - architecturally and performance-wise.

Just to clarify, IMHO their architecture appeared to be jsp model 1 architecture which IMHO is not a very performance oriented architecture. They could have at least used jsp model 2 and used various caching layers for business objects,etc.

CONNECT BY goes back to at least 7.1.x. Oracle has handled hierarchical data for a long, long time.

Odd. Oracle claimed otherwise. Sounds like another one of their marketing tricks.

You may find that you can build your app on the defacto standard DBMS and before Oracle or Microsoft buys whoever you're dealing with now. :)

Thankfully, there's no chance of that. ;-)

First of all, SQL databases can be installed and played with on your PC. Its close enough to the "big" databases to get your foot in the door. No one expects a new grad to have mastered the latest vedrsion of Oracle.

A lot of big, enterprise-level databases can be downloaded freely - Oracle, DB2, etc, either as full-but-don't-use-commercially or as trial versions. Experience - even on a personal project - with even one enterprise RDBMS would probably be considered by a potential employer if you could show them some code, say some stored procedures and some maintenance code like Bash scripts to back-up.

I agree with the parent poster - choose one specialty and know it comfortably. Don't try and be a jack-of-all-trades: it's not credible for a recent graduate, and employers will usually expect you to learn-on-the-job, anyway. Look to picking up, say, networking skills, once you've found a job.

You can download Oracle for free to 'develop' for it. It's when you start using it in a production server you have to pay.

No company can match Microsoft for blatant and unabashed hypocracy.

Guess what? "Blatant and unabashed hypocrites" rule the world.

Microsoft SQL Server Standard Edition price: $4,999 per processor. When looking at commerical database server packages, these prices aren't bad. $5K for Oracle on a high-end dual processor system can get quite a bit of work done.

Oracle claims to be running their internal corporate database on a cluster of x86 boxes (I think they are Dell's). They also claim to have chosen it, not for cost savings--Oracle has plenty of cash, but because the cluster x86 was much faster than availible Unix systems. I had a friend running their developer edition (free download) on his PII 400 at school but it wasn't doing much more than organizing his MP3 collection (test for a database class). I think he had 256 mb of ram (and this was Windows). Oracle has free downloads for non production systems go check it out and see if it meets your needs.

Mostly correct. However, be aware that Oracle are working on Linux and Linux-related projects.

Oracle on Linux isn't a bad product. You can get the latest release; Oracle Database 10g Release 1 (10.1.0.2) for Linux x86 or Linux Itanium from their Oracle Technology Network website at http://otn.oracle.com/software/products/database/o racle10g/index.html for your own non-commercial use. I played with it for a while but went back to using MySQL only because performance seemed to be better than Oracle's on a Linux box. In all fairness though, the box was an old Dell Inspiron 7500!

Because PostgreSQL doesn't have PITR, so fails the "Durability" portion of ACID.

I'd never run a mission-critical DB off an RDBMS that isn't fully ACID. Yes, I'm anal that way, but that's what happens after you've worked with a real RDBMS running on a great OS for a while.

What is needed to bring grid computing to the masses?

We need more hype.

Please read this

Just to show that it depends upon the application you need to run.

Now, you will not hear me say that you should not use ReiserFS, for a desktop it is probably the best choice, but for servers, please think again.

In addition to that, my own experiences with ReiserFS are mostly positive, especially on my 233 Mhz laptop, but I have also a big system with a Promise SX6000 raid controller, where I had a partition with ReiserFS, ext3 and JFS using Red Hat 9. Everytime I did file operations using ReiserFS I got problems with the consistency of my RAID 5 array, so I scrapped ReiserFS and only kept ext3 and JFS, which give me no problems anymore.

If you don't mind substituting one Evil Empire for another (complete with megalomaniacal CEO's), check out Oracle's proposed replacement for Exchange, called Oracle Collaboration Suite. It's centralized in the database, like Exchange will eventually be, so instead of removing virii from dozens of Exchange Servers world wide, you only clean one database. It supports Outlook client, mobile clients, and web-based as well.

Oracle Clinical: http://www.oracle.com/industries/life_sciences/ind ex.html?content.html

Additional features and support provided by Westat. They're currently working all of the CRF collection for Phase I/II/III NCI trials.

I wonder if the dual core prediction to to help licensing sales? Oracle, in it's infinate ego, charges you for TWO cpu licenses and makes you upgrade to enterprise edition if you have a dual core cpu (like the power4). Check it out
Processor: shall be defined as all processors where the Oracle programs are installed and/or running. Programs licensed on a Processor basis may be accessed by your internal users (including agents and contractors) and by your third party users. For the purposes of counting the number of processors which require licensing, a multicore chip with "n" processor cores shall be counted as "n" processors.
As M$ and oracle a jointly proven, there is not limit to greed.

It's not cool. It's just a filesystem in a database. And it's not innovative, it's been done before. Microsoft can just leverage their OS to integrate it tightly.