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

Also, none of them currently include a decent report creation tool.

Ahem... may I introduce Oracle Reports, the best enterprise reporting tool on the planet.

:-)

Secondly, the 3rd world country outsourcing is a passing fad, IMHO. Larger software houses won't do this because of unstable political, economic and educational conditions. It will cost (a lot?) more to debug code written with Hindi variables when the outsourcing company goes bust.

Which larger software houses are you talking about? Oracle?

And, no, Indian programmers don't write code with Hindi variables. I'm sick of this FUD against the Indian programmer. Plain Old FUD.

Errrrr, Oracle's Developer , Reports, and JDeveloper are what then? Indecent? Because they are GUI interface buidling tools. They don't come bundled with the database. Why should a database come bundled with GUI develoment tools??????????

Or is the unstated premise that it must be a Linux (XWindows ) based GUI building tool? Yeah, that pretty much weeds you down to Jdeveloper in the above list. However, for better or worse, the vast majority of the user desktops that need a GUI tool are Windows based or has been suggested can use a browser.

Errrrr, Oracle's Developer , Reports, and JDeveloper are what then? Indecent? Because they are GUI interface buidling tools. They don't come bundled with the database. Why should a database come bundled with GUI develoment tools??????????

Or is the unstated premise that it must be a Linux (XWindows ) based GUI building tool? Yeah, that pretty much weeds you down to Jdeveloper in the above list. However, for better or worse, the vast majority of the user desktops that need a GUI tool are Windows based or has been suggested can use a browser.

The Informix 4gl environment. x4gl is pretty common there's even a GPL version Aubit
Oracle forms
Adabas Natural
I worked for a number of years developing case tools. I saw the tools used to great effect and also saw complete disasters caused by them. As long as you work within the confines of the tool everything will be quick and robust. Try and get clever and you might as well not use a case tool. The important word is TOOL not CASE.

This simply isn't true. Oracle's clustered database solution (9i Real Application Clusters) are designed to increase the ability to gracefully recover from individual node failures. Additionally, they can scale the performance of your database application by increasing the number of CPUs with access to shared storage. For CPU bound database applications, this technology provides near linear scalability!

This feature has been available for a while now, but using a dedicated link rather than IP. Sun call it Remote Shared Memory and it's mainly used for database clusters.

There's still no match for the Exchange/Outlook combination for integrated email, directory, shared folders and calendaring.

Take a look at Oracle Collaboration Suite as an Exchange replacement that provides all of this and Outlook compitability. Lots of buzzwords and runs on linux/Oracle9i and still in version 1.0, but looks promising! 2.0 to be released in Q2 I think. Any slashdoters with hands-on experience on running OCS?

Mr Ellison stated, that the free and open Postgresql will render the expensive and clumsy Oracle database obsolete by 2005.

They say here:

Everyone knows Linux costs less; Oracle makes it faster and more reliable too. Oracle has been committed to Linux from the very beginning--releasing the first commercial Linux database in August, 1999. Today, Oracle remains the only database vendor to collaborate with Red Hat, UnitedLinux, and other Linux experts in testing, tuning, and improving the Linux kernel to make Linux Unbreakable.

They say here:

Everyone knows Linux costs less; Oracle makes it faster and more reliable too. Oracle has been committed to Linux from the very beginning--releasing the first commercial Linux database in August, 1999. Today, Oracle remains the only database vendor to collaborate with Red Hat, UnitedLinux, and other Linux experts in testing, tuning, and improving the Linux kernel to make Linux Unbreakable.

Uh... No. VS.Net only ships with Microsoft data drivers, but there is nothing stopping you from installing mySql server Oracle and any other database that has an ODBC driver (and there's a lot of them so i'm not going to link them all in here!).

They forget to mention that even if you can have more than 4gb on xeon machine you cannot address any single block of more than 4gb.

True

Forget about putting your oracle db into memory.

Not true

On a Xeon machine, Oracle will let you put up to 62GB in memory. The trick is an operating system call that fiddles the page table and "swaps" pages from areas you can't see to areas inside your address space. It works well for applications that aer conscious of 4K pages and not page thrashing. Databases are the prime example, executing a few dozen privileged instructions and changing the page tables is much faster than going to disk.

Here's a description of how to do it on Linux:

For Windows, it's called Address Windowing Extensions (AWE).

I think MySQL supports these tricks too

Alan.

I freely choose to make no money from my software work
"No they do not."

therefore everyone else must be denied the right to make money from software
I have never heard about Oracle being sued for including freesofware in their products?

Everyone has the right to make money from their work, in my understanding/opinion the GPL strongly hints anotherway of doing so. If others want to do it the traditional way, fair enough but others may opt for different techniques.

A last point : SCO is suing IBM, this does by no ways mean that IBM is guilty, at least until the trial is over.

Here's my list. These are common criticisms, some (many) of which are addressed by improvements in 2.5, 3rd party patches, and things like Red Hat Advance Server. In fact, a good reference is the Oracle paper on this version of Linux.

1) Better SMP Scalability
2) Better Asynchronous IO support
3) Fully Preemptive Kernel
4) Better threading
5) Better Memory Managment (VM)
6) Better IO scheduling
7) 64-bit IO even on 32 bit architectures
8) Reduce or Eliminate "Bounce Buffering"
9) Fine grained locking of block devices
10) Support large memory pages
11) High Memory Page Table Entries
12) Better support for RAID controllers

Access is the only thing that MS ever made that gets The_Dougster's Stamp of Approval. Access is a very lightweight database with a shitload of features.

I'd agree with that.

It is so feature heavy it makes other apps seem like toys.

Actually, as far as useful features go, Access sucks compared to other database systems. It's a toy database, for storing things like your mum's video collection titles in, or a small company's customers' addresses.

As long as you don't make Access serve for more than a couple dozen people, it is pretty amazing.

With the whole purpose of a database system being to serve data to lots of clients, being limited to a very small amount of users is a huge drawback, and a showstopper for lots of people.

The IIS webserver has a similar scalability problem. I know of Universities with IIS web server that fall over if there are more than 30 concurrent users.

Word, Excel, Powerpoint ... feh. Nothing new here, but man Access is so intense when you use all the VBA stuffings.

Ah, yeah, I can see that Access might be good from a VB programmer's point of view. It's not so good for anyone wanting to do serious amounts of complex searching.

If I was Oracle, I'd steal whoever it was that made Access.

Oracle is extremely scalable. Oracle can do stuff like this - Access can't. Even MS SQL server (a far better product than Access) can't. It's in a completely different league.

IMHO, Access is the only MS product ever that is worth its weight. It really is an innovative thing. The rest is pretty much bad copies.

Access is innovative. It makes databases easy for beginners and people who aren't expecting much ability to handle complexity from the system.

I agree that both databases are fairly different, but from what I know about Oracle, it is SO much more resiliant to failure than SQL Server.

Examples available upon request.

It won't be running Oracle? Really?

check this out

The thing that pushes ppl to Linux and Open Source is the price.

That is not true. Price is in the bottom of the list. When you buy a linux server to install expensive datatabase engines like oracle or web server farms, you want it run like a charm. It doesn't matter if it costs a lot or comes for free.

The fact is that the linux server is better.

Lotus notes

oracle collaboration

Bynari InsightServer.

There are others.

Let's not forget the old classic:

cat /var/spool/mail/hotgirl | grep sex

Although I think that's probably closly followed by 2 others:

$IPTABLES -A FORWARD -i $EXTIF -o $INTIF -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

tail - 200 access.log | grep "GET /scripts/root.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0"

I got a new game recently: The Oracle 9i install! I've been playing this for MONTHS now, and I'm still not sure how it's gonna turn out! I love the way you have to keep trying different things until you finally solve it! Please no spoilers!

I'm also a big fan of the "adding a non-standard serial device" game, but I'm not very good at it yet.

I have never used SQL Server, but my experience with PostgreSQL leads me to believe it might be competitive in many circumstances with it.

For enterprise grade solutions, PostgreSQL is not remotely competitive to Oracle. For small operations (the recent story on the .org DNS registry come to mind) it's quite likely that postgreSQL is "good enough", but a brief examination of the oracle documentation will reveal exactly what kinds of enterprise features differentiate Oracle from Postgres. Simply comparing this with the Postgres docs should end the discussion.

For anyone who thinks of them as comparable, I make the following challenge. Pick one of the core manuals from the above page. Register with Oracle Technet and simply read through the table of contents and mark Oracle features identified in the docs and assess if and how well Postgres implements it. I recommend starting with the Performance Tuning Guide, and the maybe the Data Warehousing Guide.

By doing this you can quickly fill up pages with Oracle features that PostgreSQL does not have. I chose the two guides listed above because I can say with confidence that the features listed in the Oracle docs are heavily used because I have personally done so.

I know this isn't free, but there are alternatives. Oracle Calendar Server is an up an coming competitor to Outlook.

And while we're on the topics of JDeveloper and Rational, it's worth noting that JDev now integrates class and activity UML diagramming tools. Also, the 9i developer suite includes an Oracle repository-based SCM tool. So, apparently, Oracle has decided to go their own way on the UML and SCM fronts (although, oddly enough, I recall that a couple of years ago some Oracle people I was working with were discussing rumours of Oracle buying Rational).

I'll second the opinion that it's a good IDE. It's straight Java...I run it on Win2K, Linux, and Solaris. Get it here if you're curious.

The software to manage multiple access via firewire was recently released GPL by Oracle.

I have read several articles here why people prefer to use because Oracle is so expensive.

Unless you are planning to use it in a commercial setting, Oracle is free as in beer!

The latest version of Oracle for Linux can be downloaded from here

>help keep the company in a (relatively) good position in the database server market

I guess that with a market share of 54%, "relatively" is the key word in that sentence...

Actually, this is of no surprise to many that have followed Oracle over the past few years (perhaps 5+).

Oracle has been incoporating many open standards into their products recently which has been necessary to help keep the company in a (relatively) good position in the database server market. In the past all of their technologies were proprietary with their custom SQL extensions and their custom language for stored procedures and triggers (PL/SQL). Oh, and Linux - forget about it.

However much of that has changed and now they support Linux, XML, Java (I believe the first to have Java stored procedures), and a large portion of the J2EE platform with things like OC4J (their java app server based on Orion).

See these links for just a sampling of what I'm talking about.

Actually, this is of no surprise to many that have followed Oracle over the past few years (perhaps 5+).

Oracle has been incoporating many open standards into their products recently which has been necessary to help keep the company in a (relatively) good position in the database server market. In the past all of their technologies were proprietary with their custom SQL extensions and their custom language for stored procedures and triggers (PL/SQL). Oh, and Linux - forget about it.

However much of that has changed and now they support Linux, XML, Java (I believe the first to have Java stored procedures), and a large portion of the J2EE platform with things like OC4J (their java app server based on Orion).

See these links for just a sampling of what I'm talking about.

On the sever side the market is much more mature, you can get Oracle on Linux and DB2 for Linux if you want a database. For mail and workflow Lotus Domino is available amongst many others.

IMHO these are either recognised mature products or fulfill a new and/or unique function. A new IM tool does niether of these.

Did you get a source code escrow agreement with the closed source vendors? Generally these agreements are for when companies go belly up. Source code escrow agreements also cost more than traditional vendor support. The only way to compare apples to apples is to ask each vendor to supply one.

Most support agreements must continuously in force along with having the current version of the application. With an open source application support can be ad hoc, when needed. If the application is properly vetted and tested before going live, why do you need support? If you build an open source ap - you had better build unit tests that make sure the application and its various APIS work will. With a closed source application you generally don't have a set of unit tests (Just stick the disk in and press "Go"), so you have no way of knowing if the application is performing to specifications after the upgrade other than the "Well it seems to be working test." I would suggest you check your methodology for costs and simply out-source application support to professional services house. There is no need to support the application internally when you can easily have professional services firm in India support it. On the other hand you can always buy IBM - They will provide support forever for enough money!

This is a technology that allows you to set up several commodity intel boxes (or solaris, or whatever) as a cluster, with a shared storage device to hold the data files. The clever bit is that it appears to all intents and purposes to be a single instance of the database, meaning apps don't have to be rewritten to take advantage of clustering.

The kicker though is trying to source a shared storage unit for less than £50k. All quotes from Dell (our supplier) are for fibre-channel devices that cost a fortune, but I know deep down that we can accomplish this with a SCSI unit with simultanious connections to each server. The Oracle RAC software takes care of the synchronisation between writes to the disks, so things shouldn't get out of sync.

I'd be interested to hear if anybody has been able to source a shared storage SCSI unit, and in particular which brand etc. I'm trying to set up a low cost RAC cluster using Dell PCs, SuSE SLES-7 and the Oracle software, and I need the storage solution to be cheap as well.

Couldn't find the 10 times faster than .Net comparison by Oracle, but:

http://www2.theserverside.com/resources/article.js p?l=PetStore

http://www.oracle.com/features/9i/index.html?9iasf ast.html

The latter gives a measurement of 538ms response time for 600 users on the Petshop. Since the Middleware Company PDF lists response time as 14ms for "J2EE AppServer A" and 10ms for .Net, at 750 users, there's obviously some difference in benchmarking practices. If anyone has a link to the "10 times faster" propaganda, please post.

I currently have to implement a DotLRN (.lrn) site which is based on OpenACS.

But anyway, OpenACS is the reworked version of ACS (which stands for 'Asomething' Community System) that was written for Oracle and AOLserver.

OpenACS is written in TCL, specifically for PostgreSQL and AOLserver.

I don't like TCL that much, but at least it works

• Which IDE you want to use, ranging from Open Source $0 IDE to commercial ones.
• Which source control you want to use, ranging from Open Source $0 source control to commercial ones.
• Which middle tier implementation you want to use, ranging from Open Source $0 application servers to commercial ones
• Which database you want to use, ranging from Open Source $0 databases to commercial ones.

In short, you choose J2EE in order to have a choice of what software you want to use within your business and how much you are willing to pay for it, what hardware (Intel, Sun, IBM) and operating systems (Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, OS/400) requirements you have, and what requirements you have on the performance (single Intel box to 64 CPU Sun box to IBM mainframe) and scalability of your application.

You make J2EE match your requirements rather than force yourself to match .NET requirements.

I can't wait to see how MS trys to make money selling apache

Probably the same way as Oracle.

OK, Mr. Ellison. You've made your point.

If you need Oracle 9i and you need x86, there's Oracle for Linux I'm thinking Oracle ran a few performance tests of x86/Solaris/Oracle and x86/Linux/Oracle, then chose the platform that would give them the marketing numbers they need (and the performance their customers NEED). Originally Oracle/Linux was more a developer training tool, now it seems to be attempting ot compete with SQL Server. GO Oracle!

Firewire Patches fixes some issues with Firewire on Linux and enables shared disk on top of firewire drivers. Firewire allows developers to easily and cheaply build a clustered system on a shared disk, which is useful for testing clustered applications and checking out the advanced features of Oracle's Real Application Clusters technology. The Firewire cards needed to build a cluster can cost as little as 10% as much as the required FiberChannel hardware.

What is going to spur Xserve sales is this! Or here's what apple shows.

I'm very excited but still waiting on the G5/64Bit architecture and a better implemenation to avoid bottlenecks, something more closely resembling Solaris/SPARC with the ease of use of Mac OS (10.2).

Oracle claims here to have solved this problem. They are internally replacing dozens of Exchange servers with a three-server cluster using their software for e-mail, voicemail, fax, and calendar.

It ain't open source, but it is an alternative and covers many of the bases discussed in this forum.

-ez

I don't think it's scheduled for release until later in the year, but it looks like it could be the standards-based, robust solution that just might get people to migrate away from Win2K/Exchange on the messaging side.

Go to Oracle's site and check it out. It looks promising.

Give me a product, open source or not, that provides my clients (on whose interests I act) with the functionality of Exchange, and I'll get the Purchase Order ready by close of business today.

I don't have any experience with it, but at LinuxWorld last week Oracle demonstrated their Oracle Collaboration Suite. It works with Outlook and they also demonstrated doing email and group calendering on the KDE desktop.

Anyone else notice that the 9 in 9i and 9 in Mac OS 9 are identical? I guess it's a good thing that Jobs and Ellison are buddy-buddy or somebody's lawyers would be whacking someone else's lawyers over their heads with giant salamis.

Actually, Oracle has used MVCC from the beginning. It's a different implementation from PostgreSQL's, but it's still MVCC. Oracle uses its undo logs to "read around" pending (uncommitted) writes to the database. This is not at all new in 9i. You can read Oracle's 8.1.7 (8i) documentation to see that this is so.

PostgreSQL essentially creates new database blocks when fulfilling write requests. When those are committed, the old ones aren't needed -- hence the requisite vacuum process in PostgreSQL. More or less, it's a form of database garbage collection.

I can't say I've used SAP-DB. However, a quick check of its online documentation reveals that it does NOT do multiversion concurrency control. Oracle does. PostgreSQL does. I believe Interbase/Firebird does. Without it, writing a scalable application is MUCH, MUCH harder because locking keeps getting in the way. Real databases need transactions, but without MVCC, the locking to support them will seriously limit concurrency (and, hence, scalability) in a transactional environment.

If you don't know what MVCC is, read the early chapters in Tom Kyte's book or visit his site. Or read Oracle documentation (search the page for "Data Concurrency and Consistency").

I can't say I've used SAP-DB. However, a quick check of its online documentation reveals that it does NOT do multiversion concurrency control. Oracle does. PostgreSQL does. I believe Interbase/Firebird does. Without it, writing a scalable application is MUCH, MUCH harder because locking keeps getting in the way. Real databases need transactions, but without MVCC, the locking to support them will seriously limit concurrency (and, hence, scalability) in a transactional environment.

If you don't know what MVCC is, read the early chapters in Tom Kyte's book or visit his site. Or read Oracle documentation (search the page for "Data Concurrency and Consistency").

A most of the links seem good here is some stuff that didn't get mentioned that might make for good add ons:

99 Bottles of Beer This site has the same program in several hundred languages which is useful for easy language comparison.

Oracle Docs Tons and tons of information much of which applies beyond Oracle (full SQL dictionary, full documentation for ODJC and JDBC...)

IBM developer works A mixed bag of articles on a wide range of topics

IBM redbooks (link is http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/cdrom s , slashdot isn't taking it right) If you need any information on legacy systems or are looking to see how the mainframe world handles issues not yet handled by the Unix world this site is amazingly useful.

Developers edge by Netscape Good stuff on web programming.

If you need all that, you can get it here and pay for it. Sheesh.