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Although I'm going to get flamed for this, Microsoft Project Central is an absolute godsend - easy to input time from, and you can collect the stats from team members to go into your Project plans easily and efficiently.

Some people will attack 'Strategy #6' as being "capitalist", "corporate", or "insufficiently GNU"; other people (myself included) think that's just fine :-)

We do not believe that Linux plays a role on the server. Period.

[...]

Sun, hear me! It is true, what many of you have heard. The Linux machines have gathered an army of beowulfs and as I speak, that army is drawing nearer to our home. Believe me when I say we have a difficult time ahead of us. But if we are to be prepared for it, we must first shed our fear of it. I stand here, before you now, truthfully unafraid. Why? Because I believe something you do not? No, I stand here without fear because I remember. I remember that I am here not because of the path that lies before me but because of the path that lies behind me. I remember that for 100 years we have fought these Linux machines. I remember that for 100 years they have sent their beowulf armies to destroy us, and after a century of war I remember that which matters most...We are still here! Today, let us send a message to that beowulf army. Tonight, let us shake this cave. Tonight, let us tremble these halls of earth, steel, and stone, let us be heard from red tar to black sky. Tonight, let us make them remember, this is Sun and we are not afraid!

You can make a High Availability cluster out of most any software if you have some kind of shared storage.

People have used firewire drives connected to two different computers to accomplish this cheaply. Oracle is giving away a cluster filesystem (so they can sell RAC on linux) there is OpenGFS as well for filesystem usage.

Just write some basic monitoring scripts that will bring up your postgress database on the second server should the first one fail. Just make sure those scripts completely take down the old database on the first server in the case of a partial failure. Having two databases try to open the same data would be a really bad thing.

Here are some links to articles that should help:

Overview

Howto

Cluster Filesystem

These are mainly geared for Oracle/RAC, all you need is the firewire shared storage and cluster filesystem. You're on your own to write the monitoring and failover scripts. Hope this helps. --Chris

You can make a High Availability cluster out of most any software if you have some kind of shared storage.

People have used firewire drives connected to two different computers to accomplish this cheaply. Oracle is giving away a cluster filesystem (so they can sell RAC on linux) there is OpenGFS as well for filesystem usage.

Just write some basic monitoring scripts that will bring up your postgress database on the second server should the first one fail. Just make sure those scripts completely take down the old database on the first server in the case of a partial failure. Having two databases try to open the same data would be a really bad thing.

Here are some links to articles that should help:

Overview

Howto

Cluster Filesystem

These are mainly geared for Oracle/RAC, all you need is the firewire shared storage and cluster filesystem. You're on your own to write the monitoring and failover scripts. Hope this helps. --Chris

You can make a High Availability cluster out of most any software if you have some kind of shared storage.

People have used firewire drives connected to two different computers to accomplish this cheaply. Oracle is giving away a cluster filesystem (so they can sell RAC on linux) there is OpenGFS as well for filesystem usage.

Just write some basic monitoring scripts that will bring up your postgress database on the second server should the first one fail. Just make sure those scripts completely take down the old database on the first server in the case of a partial failure. Having two databases try to open the same data would be a really bad thing.

Here are some links to articles that should help:

Overview

Howto

Cluster Filesystem

These are mainly geared for Oracle/RAC, all you need is the firewire shared storage and cluster filesystem. You're on your own to write the monitoring and failover scripts. Hope this helps. --Chris

I understand why most passwords are needed. I also understand why needed passwords need to be difficult to guess (and therefore difficult to remember.

That said, I get very irritated when web sites require you to set up a user account, supply an email address, and remember the username and password for that account just to access some information.

For example, to get to many of Oracle's technical documents on technet.oracle.com, one needs to have a password-protected user account. The account is free, but its only purpose appears to be to allow them to track users. I really wouldn't care if someone broke into my Oracle account, as all it lets them do is search Oracle technical documents. This is just one example.

A few previous posters have noted that strict memorization of passwords is not that difficult. I don't dispute that fact. But my password database has, literally, about a hundred passwords. It grows regularly. I could certainly study the list, but who has time -- especially as the list grows and the passwords need to be frequently changed.

I hope that SSL/SSH client authentication alleviates the need to memorize passwords to some extent. The difficulties are that users use multiple computers, and that the client software to manage this is more difficult to use than many are prepared to deal with.

Looks like Microsoft is trying to get on the "Grid Computing" bandwagon, which has been gathering steam ever since the economist ran an article about it. Oracle and IBM both have major Grid Computing initiatives, and Microsoft wants to pretend they can play with the Big Dogs in the Server Room.

Imagine once the Microsofties dumb the concept down to the Windows level... the 'My Grid' and 'Grids Close To Me' icons on an ostensibly well-trained admin's desktop... aaaaarrrggghh!

Right now, in 2003, Linux has no equivalent to Dotnet or WinFS nor any plan for such features . Such VMs and DBs that do exist are completely unexploited (and often impossible to exploit) from the kernel, the core tools and the popular desktops and office applications.

I'm assuming that your referring to a Linux system as a whole and not explicitly the kernel. The reason why these shouldn't be part of the kernel are pretty straightforward, .NET is a development framework and WinFS is a database driven file system. That said, the equivalents for .NET would be Mono / dotGNU and for WinFS you could use Oracle's IFS , not free but then neither is Windows.

My first port of call was Oracle because I thought they'd surely give out a free demo version I could play with and installation would be easy. Unfortunately I couldn't find such a beast

Did you try their web site? The little "Downloads" link on their main web page?

Seriously, both 8i and 9i are available as downloads, as long with a ton of other stuff. You'll want a fast link, 9i is a couple or 3 CDs. (I DL'd the developer version with a lot of extra stuff)

installation would be easy.

Well, that's a relative term. I had problems with 8i (because of my configuration) but 9i worked fine.

Oh, and that download link goes to here.

All oracle tools are freely downloadable from the Oracle website

http://otn.oracle.com/software/content.html

Here's a quote from Oracle's site source here:

The examples I will use here are written using RedHat Linux 9, however, other versions of RedHat Linux-- as well as other Linux distributions--use similar if not the same syntax.

Or take cpu mnufacturers. They offer cpus specifically targeted to the server market, and they don't care which distro you run. They support them all. Or do we now not count cpu manufacturers as part of the IT industry?

Different versions of GNU/Linux are pretty much interchangeable, and most people understand that. Seibt doesn't, or he's trying to pull a SCO.

The actual facts say that SuSE is bullshitting when they claim to be "up there" in terms of numbers, as was pointed out by distroWatch, both in an earlier link, and here, where interest in SuSE lags below Mandrake, Red Hat, Gentoo, Yoper, Debian, and Knoppix, and especially here, where they point out that SuSE is talking out of their ass, in specific reference to Seibt's comments.

Or you might want to look at this slashdot poll, where even insensitive clod distros outpolled SuSE.

SuSE seems to think that its' all about the install. I think they've come down with a YaST infection.

Here's a quote from Oracle's site source here:

The examples I will use here are written using RedHat Linux 9, however, other versions of RedHat Linux-- as well as other Linux distributions--use similar if not the same syntax.

Or take cpu mnufacturers. They offer cpus specifically targeted to the server market, and they don't care which distro you run. They support them all. Or do we now not count cpu manufacturers as part of the IT industry?

Different versions of GNU/Linux are pretty much interchangeable, and most people understand that. Seibt doesn't, or he's trying to pull a SCO.

The actual facts say that SuSE is bullshitting when they claim to be "up there" in terms of numbers, as was pointed out by distroWatch, both in an earlier link, and here, where interest in SuSE lags below Mandrake, Red Hat, Gentoo, Yoper, Debian, and Knoppix, and especially here, where they point out that SuSE is talking out of their ass, in specific reference to Seibt's comments.

Or you might want to look at this slashdot poll, where even insensitive clod distros outpolled SuSE.

SuSE seems to think that its' all about the install. I think they've come down with a YaST infection.

Here are the distros currently supported by Oracle.

Yes, it's mostly just RedHat and SuSE that are supported by Oracle. Actually, SuSE just falls under UnitedLinux alongside SCO and some others. Not just any SuSE, either. The personal edition of SuSE you can download for free is not supported. You need Advanced or Enterprise Server versions of RedHat, SuSE, and other distros in order to be actually "supported" by Oracle.

That said, I'm sucessfully running Oracle 8i on Slackware and Oracle 9i on free SuSE, but those are non-production servers for evaluation.

The production servers run PostgreSQL on Slackware, naturally! ;-)

I've just had a chance to look through the RHAS paper on OTN (Oracle Technology Network, http://otn.oracle.com)

The main three features of RHAS2.1 as far as Oracle are concerned are;

• The I/O Subsystem has been improved, to include asynchronous I/O, elimination of multiple copies to memory buffers while writing to disk, reducing contention for kernel locks, and numerous IO driver enhancements. This is for both ext2 and raw partitions.

• Larger SGA for systems with up to 4GB of RAM. RHAS 2.1 comes with two kernels; the default SMP kernel which supports up to 4GB RAM and uses two-level page tables; and the enterprise kernel which supports up to 64GB RAM and requires three-level page tables. This means you can increase the database buffer cache up to a theoretical 62Gb.

• Improvements to the process scheduler which eliminates some locking problems.

You can download the full document about RHAS and Oracle from OTN at http://otn.oracle.com/tech/linux/pdf/9iR2-on-Linux -Tech-WP-Final.PDF

That's news to Oracle: What Distributions of Linux Does Oracle Support?

The following distributions are certified and supported by Oracle: Red Hat Linux Advanced Server [and] UnitedLinux.

Actually, that's not an "if". In fact it's already happened. To support Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), they had to implement a Clustered File System for Linux. That was done, and released under the GPL:

http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs/

With respect to filesystems and database performance. EXT3 came out on top.

I have hardly ever seen a major publication (of any sort!) refer to Linux as anything except "an open-source operating system", or the like. It is not an operating system-- it is a kernel. (It is not even "open-source"-- it is "free software"! Not to wax RMSish...)

Check Oracle Magazine July/Augut 2003:

Another common misconception about Linux is that it's a complete operating system. In reality Linux refers to the kernel--or core--of the operating system. Combining Linux with a set of open-source GNU programs from the Free Software Foundation turns it into what most people know as Linux

Actually, the whole article is accurate.

Go here [oracle.com] and see how Oracle can't even maintain their own Search engine on their web site. For even more fun, click the Search link that is provided by the error message! Oracle FAILS IT!!!!!!!! Big TIME! This proves yet again that Oracle is a piece of shit! Boy am I glad that I steered my company away from that turd and onto MySQL.

Go here and see how Oracle can't even maintain their own Search engine on their web site. For even more fun, click the Search link that is provided by the error message! Oracle FAILS IT!!!!!!!! Big TIME! This proves yet again that Oracle is a piece of shit! Boy am I glad that I steered my company away from that turd and onto MySQL.

try Oracle they made that 'switch' and are pushing it themselves...

And what choice do they have? It's either take the job or be unemployed and have no money food etc, and hope that your familiy can support you. (Welfare? doesn't exist of course)

What choice do they have? Lets see, they could work for Sun, Cisco, Microsoft, Motorola, Yahoo, Adobe, Hughes, EDS or Oracle, to name a few employers in India.

What makes you think that IBM are even looking for the best talent?

How much bargaining power in the job market do you think these Indian workers have?

you seem to be woefully misinformed about the Indian job market. The number one concern of employers is how to retain their employees for more that 6 months due to aggressive recruiting techniques and incentives from competitors. Check out Monster India, Naukri or Career India for a clue, or just look at the results for this Google search.

Krishna

If you are OK with non-free software, you might also want to check out Oracle's BI Beans. They are pretty powerful and will let you build many different kinds of charts and graphs - even interactive ones.

They also support United Linux. Look in the Oracle Linux FAQ, here for example.

Oracle 9iAS RAC(clustering)
Dell RAID array for share storage of the cluster nodes
RedHat 9.1 Advance Server(I wish I'd use something else but Oracle only support RH)

And BTW Oracle supports SuSE SLES 7+, and basically United Linux.

Copyright, patent, and tradmark laws are not uniformly followed in the various off-shore programming destinations. You'd be unlikely to see "Intellectual Property" (their term, not mine -- don't flame me) concious companys sending serious development work offshore for fear of it being hijacked.

Reality, however, is different. I work for a large software house with its 2,000-strong technical workforce in India. Several portions of its flagship products are developed here.

Why do you Americans keep trying to convince yourselves that the tech jobs will somehow stay back there? Either we non-Americans can't speak/write English, or we're incompetent, or we don't have good IP laws, or <insert favourite consolation>

Copyright, patent, and tradmark laws are not uniformly followed in the various off-shore programming destinations. You'd be unlikely to see "Intellectual Property" (their term, not mine -- don't flame me) concious companys sending serious development work offshore for fear of it being hijacked.

Reality, however, is different. I work for a large software house with its 2,000-strong technical workforce in India. Several portions of its flagship products are developed here.

Why do you Americans keep trying to convince yourselves that the tech jobs will somehow stay back there? Either we non-Americans can't speak/write English, or we're incompetent, or we don't have good IP laws, or <insert favourite consolation>

Copyright, patent, and tradmark laws are not uniformly followed in the various off-shore programming destinations. You'd be unlikely to see "Intellectual Property" (their term, not mine -- don't flame me) concious companys sending serious development work offshore for fear of it being hijacked.

Reality, however, is different. I work for a large software house with its 2,000-strong technical workforce in India. Several portions of its flagship products are developed here.

Why do you Americans keep trying to convince yourselves that the tech jobs will somehow stay back there? Either we non-Americans can't speak/write English, or we're incompetent, or we don't have good IP laws, or <insert favourite consolation>

I disagree. Why do you want to reimplement database features such as sequences when the developers of MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, etc. have spent plenty of time optimizing it. Ask Tom Kyte (of Oracle) his opinion about doing something like that -- here's his answer.

"But," you say, "that will mean making different versions of my code for each different database." Not exactly. Take a look at the implementation of Hibernate which uses classes such as OracleDialect and MySQLDialect which are subclasses of Dialect. Each of these specific dialects implements vendor-specific code for sequences (and others). This allows the application level code to maintain its database independence while at the same time taking advantage of the vendor-specific features.

Doug

good information about one of the most important aspects of persistance in an object oriented language: Object Relational Mapping. I haven't read the book myself, but if it doesn't cover Java OR mapping layers such as Cocobase, Toplink and EOF (part of WebObjects), or any of the open source OR mapping frameworks, and the theoretical foundation they are all based on, then to me it isn't worth it.

• MS Exchange Server (server end; NT only), MS Outlook (client end; Win32, MacOS). Very limited support of open-protocol clients (IMAP, webmail?). Microsoft Corp. wants to sell you Exchange 2000, these days, but Exchange 5.5 is still very common.

• Lotus Notes / Domino (server end, Linux supported), Lotus Notes (client end; Win32, MacOS). Limited webmail access (iNotes).

• Novell Groupwise. http://www.novell.com/products/groupwise/ Server end runs on either Novell NetWare 5/6 or WinNT. Client end is proprietary Win32 client or webmail. A native Linux client is under development.

• SuSE Linux Openexchange Server (formerly SuSE Linux eMail Server). Standard, good open-source components (Postfix, Apache, Cyrus IMAP, OpenLDAP, OpenSSL) preconfigured to work well with one another, plus a couple of proprietary components: YaST2 for graphical administration, and SkyrixGreen for integrated scheduling and group discussions (shared folders). Client access from any OS, including but not limited to webmail. A full-functional trial version (lacking only "maintenance") is available for US $20 at http://www.suse.com/openexchange/slox_eval_form.ht ml . Sites are known to scale well to at least 1,000 users per site. The largest deployment yet known (March 2003) is 1,900 users.

• Bynari Insight Server, http://www.bynari.net/ . Server end is Linux-based. Intended as a plug-compatible replacement for MS-Exchange Server, based on POP3, IMPA, SMTP, and LDAP, but also with full support for all the special, proprietary MS-Exchange Server RPC-based protocols for group discussion, scheduling, contact management, task lists, etc., when used with MS-Outlook clients. Review: http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6734

• Bynari InsightConnector, http://www.bynari.net/ . Extensions that load into MS-Outlook clients to let them perform MS-Exchange-type functions (scheduling, contact-management, public folders) without needing an MS-Exchange server, using only open-standard IMAP, SMTP, and LDAP servers, instead.

• Samsung Contact (formerly HP Openmail), http://samsungcontact.com/en/ . Server end can be Linux-based (or Solaris/AIX). Based on SMTP, IMAP, POP3, LDAP. Supports proprietary protocols for e-mail, scheduling, etc. native to Samsung's Contact client (which is available on Linux and Win32). Webmail access. Implements Microsoft's (documented, for a change) MAPI protocol for scheduling, public folders, offline folders.

• Oracle Collaboration Suite, http://www.oracle.com/ip/deploy/cs/ . Formerly Steltor CorporateTime, http://www.steltor.com/, until that firm's recent acquisition by Oracle. (That product is said to have emerged from Netscape Calendar.) Does IMAP, POP3, SMTP, E-mail, real-time conferences, voicemail, scheduling. Apparently implements all of the special, proprietary MS-Exchange Server RPC-based protocols for group discussion, scheduling, contact management,

Um you might want to look at this: Oracle Collaboration Suite It is like a database...for your e-mail and other associated stuff.

that was orion server which had nothing to do with apache.

Hmm, I know Orion is in there, but I'm pretty sure that Apache is, too.

What is .NET exactly?

I can tell you what it is not.

Here is the Link

I'm looking forward to this! I personally am sick and tired of filesystems as we know them today. Today's filesystems are a strict hierarchy, the existence of which is only necessary in the systems of yester-year.

A filesystem based on a relational database will have some characteristics to which today's filesystems can only aspire:

1. ACID - In every way that the underlying database supports Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability, so now will the filesystem. In so far as the database is robust, the filesystem will be robust. Please spare me the comments about the supposed unreliability of SQL Server. Itâ(TM)s certainly more reliable than NTFS; which is itself very good.

2. As an offshoot of the above - Imagine multiple file updates to a filesystem which is transactional! Imagine that transaction failing and being able to just rollback the changes without touching every file in your program! Imagine being able to make file changes programmatically without having to worry about locking because the engine will do it for you (just handle any exceptions)! Yeah, you could do all that today if you like. But it takes extensive to make it happen.

3. Operational characteristics - We can run queries against databases. We can index them. We can cluster them. We can replicate them. We can access them easily from any development platform you can imagine. Now your filesystem is a database. The possibilities make me shiver! :+) Maybe the initial implementation wonâ(TM)t get all this right. But at least it stands a chance.

4. Another offshoot from #3 - Security. Databases are inherently better than filesystems (IMNSHO) at enforcing security and enabling administration of security.

I only have reservations about one issue with the database as filesystem area: recovery. Currently, all good and low-tech filesystem recovery tools really are based on the filesystem allocation table sort of scheme. Obviously, databases usurp this category of tried and true tools. However, good tools already do exist that allow recovery of relational databases. Itâ(TM)s just a matter of getting easily accessible tools of this sort into the hands of professionals that need them. It's more of a training issue I guess, but it will still need addressing.

I know many people will have a knee jerk reaction to this idea, and I understand why. But I would encourage people to keep an open mind to this. While there will probably be some issues with the idea, there's so much more that could easily be done with a filesystem on top of a database than could be done easily (or well) with a traditional filesystem.

And for you hard-core naysayers out there, you have to ask yourself this: If this is such a bad idea, then why did Oracle provide this as a feature too?

Larry Ellison wants to buy /. as per the press release on their website. They have not made the offer public yet.

Would you mind telling /. readers how much are you being offered ??

Maybe we all can subscribe and keep /. afloat...

The consumer-packaged RedHat Linux (7,8,9... anything other than AS 2.x) will NOT support Oracle.

Note that Red Hat currently has a number of "Enterprise" versions, of which one is "AS", but all of which seem to be Oracle-approved. In fact, Oracle recommends "WS" as the cost-effective "Advanced Server" for developers, and it's quite reasonably priced (as far as software for businesses goes).

There are a plethora of 'enhancements' in AS 2.1 ( which I guess is now Red Hat EL-AS ) that Oracle can take advantage of. You may want to give this whitepaper a read for some in depth look at some of the "Performance, Reliability, and Manageability Encnhancements on Red Hat Linux AS 2.1" I'm not a big time Oracle person, but my understanding is that many of these enhancements are only applicable on larger systems (by larger I mean 2+ CPU/>2Gb RAM).
Here is a feature chart comparing EL-AS, EL-WS, and EL-ES. As you can see you there are differing levels of support for things like ia64, large amounts of RAM, and >2 CPUs. This definately isn't at 'salesmen screwing with you' type of thing. There are definately some things to consider when deciding between going with AS or not. I would have some concerns about this becuase you are asking slashdot about this when there is a decent amount of data on redhat.com explaining the differences between their different OS releases. If, as you claim, you have in house people with the skillsets to manage you linux systems you might not even need redhat at all, just roll your own that meets your needs. If, on the other hand, you require and OS that is certified by your other software vendors then your purchasing decision will be swayed by that requirement, and most likely swayed towards the AS/EL-?? line of products (or suse or ).
Bleah.
Enough rambling and spelling mistakes for this post.

At two previous jobs I used PeopleSoft's suite and found it lacking. At one I did a bit of reverse engineering on the database, and I had perl scripts generating better reports than their $x million software, which also crashed daily. (Nobody seemed to know exactly what x was, but afaict everybody who had to do with the decision to use PeopleSoft no longer worked there. Which might tell you something.) Oh, and for all the article's 'PeopleSoft is (used to be) a caring company' lines, I can assure you that once they have your money they don't care the slightest about their customers, even when you're still paying for service.

On the other hand, during that same period, I talked to a number of people about Oracle's suite (Oracle E-Business Suite, OEBS) as a potential replacement. There are lots of sites talking about all the money and time people save using OEBS, just as there are for PeopleSoft. But every person I actually talked to said, essentially, that it was crap and they regretted it, but don't tell anyone.

So, I guess my point is that both of them are basically crap software that got their reputation because no public company would ever admit to their shareholders that their well-researched software decision was a multi-million dollar disaster. So they deserve each other.

And on that note, I think I'm going to post this anonymously, since even though it's all true libel suites are time consuming.

I agree very much with Randolpho's post. Ditch PHP if you really want an elegent architecture. If you really need to stick with PHP, try out Midgard. Otherwise, you really ought to at least look at the alternatives. Zope and OpenACS are probably the best open source web application systems/environments/architectures, whatever you want to call it. I prefer OpenACS (there's just something about using a system that was built primarily by highly intelligent MIT and CalTech alumni...).

OpenACS is based on AOLServer (probably the best, and first application-oriented web server out there, which was GPL'd by AOL thanks to Phil Greenspun's nagging. it's multi-threaded, it has database pooling, a healthy set of modules/plugins, and a wonderful community.), Tcl (you'll get used to it, really ;), and either Oracle or PostgreSQL. Thought it was designed for use with Oracle, and was ported to PostgreSQL, the architecture in OpenACS permits you to easily swap in support for other databases. Though, you'd have an extremely tough time getting it to work in MySQL as it relies on numerous high-end and complex relational databases features, most of which MySQL does not support.

OpenACS is highly modular, built entirely out of smaller packages, with its own package management system. There is a core package, the ACS Kernel, ACS Tcl (which contains most of the utility code, etc.), and there are various packages built on top of that which provide both specific application functionality, but also services that other packages can use. The documentation is built into the code and is available online in every OpenACS installation. Higher up packages include web page creation, bulletin board systems, blogging, content management, etc. You can "mount" these packages at various locations in the site map for your web site / application. E.g., you could mount an instance of the bulletin board at mysite.com/forum, and add a second one at mysite.com/techsupport. You can create subsites, such as mysite.com/internal/. There is an extensive and incredibly powerful permissions system so you can completely control access to every part of your system. There is also a built-in templating system which provides a simple separation between logic and display code, as well as theming capabilities.

I'm sure there's a lot that I've neglected to mention here. But I think you can get the point. OpenACS is a very mature platform that's be in development and production for many years now (hell, take a look at what Ars Digita was able to accomplish, they were making millions selling this system, and they gave the code away for free under the GPL). Don't take my word for it, go to the website and read about it. The only drawback to it that I see is that it does have a high learning curve. It took me a few months of reading and experimenting with it to really understand how the system works, but it's definitely worth it. There are a few hosting providers out there (Acorn Hosting and Zill.net) that offer affordable hosting packages, but it's also easy to setup your own server. OpenACS also has the ability to run multiple server boxes in a load balanced environment, so if you need to scale out, you can. Oh yeah, this is also a descendant of the same ACS system that RedHat's Enterprise Applications are descended from (RedHat got that technology when they bought the remains of ArsDigita.

We are using Oracle Collaboration Suite, formerly known as Steltor CorporateTime formerly known as Netscape Calendar.

Server runs on Linux and Windows, clients are running on Linux and Windows. Multiple node ability, i.e. servers across continents are possible.

And it's not as simple as hardware/software prices/support. There's some critical stuff that cannot and does not show up in the specs, and it's not cheap.
I agree. Perhaps, after all Linux can not seem to run very top-end systems. Worse yet, you will not find it in the enterprise systems As to the Desktop, Well skip that as well

You can solve yesterday's problems on tomorrow's computers quite cheaply.
Same thing here as well (with out the sarcasm). Tomorrow's problems are being solved on todays computers due to their low cost. Otherwise, we would be waiting till the costs of the computers were less than the costs of the problem.

You might want to try an open-source relational database engine like PostGreSQL

This means, of course, you'll have to create your own schemata for logging version control and records added, but versioning additions to the database -- and user/connect information -- can be tracked with a combination of triggers and timestamps in a separate table. These are fairly standard techniques in generating an audit trail for tracking relational database changes and enforcing data integrity constraints. While the syntax varies from database engine to database engine--PostGreSQL is a good (free) place to start, and if the spirit moves you (or if the DB becomes too large) the syntax differences do not preclude your moving to, say, a development edition of IBM's DB2 UDB or even (aack!) Oracle. All three run rather nicely under SuSE Linux, and are said to run quite nicely under RedHat, as well.

It probably wouldn't harm you at all to develop this database with a relational database, and test it under different engines-- in fact, it would likely make you highly employable in the very near future.

Just from curiosity, how much data are we talking about for a large corporation, say SW Air or BofA?

Impossible to put a figure on the total amount of data that exists within an organization, but a typical SAN in a major financial institution has terabytes online. UBS Warburg has 2 Tb in just its general ledger database. Acxion has 25 Tb in its data warehouse, which will mainly be used for queries, whereas the GL database will be more transaction heavy. SouthWest is an Oracle customer, but it doesn't say here how much data they have.

Just from curiosity, how much data are we talking about for a large corporation, say SW Air or BofA?

Impossible to put a figure on the total amount of data that exists within an organization, but a typical SAN in a major financial institution has terabytes online. UBS Warburg has 2 Tb in just its general ledger database. Acxion has 25 Tb in its data warehouse, which will mainly be used for queries, whereas the GL database will be more transaction heavy. SouthWest is an Oracle customer, but it doesn't say here how much data they have.

Just from curiosity, how much data are we talking about for a large corporation, say SW Air or BofA?

Impossible to put a figure on the total amount of data that exists within an organization, but a typical SAN in a major financial institution has terabytes online. UBS Warburg has 2 Tb in just its general ledger database. Acxion has 25 Tb in its data warehouse, which will mainly be used for queries, whereas the GL database will be more transaction heavy. SouthWest is an Oracle customer, but it doesn't say here how much data they have.

Don't forget JDeveloper or just download it from http://otn.oracle.com/software/products/jdev/