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It is your browser and your computer but those ads like them or not are supporting the sites you visit. Blocking them is one thing (I skip magazine ads and TV commercials and fully believe I have the rights to block web ads) but what Gator is doing is not very nice. Right now I am looking at and ad for the new Altus 130 from Penguin Computing. Gator would replace that with one of its avertisers. If enough slashdot readers used Gator (fat chance) over time Penguin and other advertisers would drop Slashdot and we'd either all be forced to subscribe or the site would shut down.

I think that web advertising needs to change. Banner ads and popups are easy to block and replace thus pissing off the advertisers and the site owners. Not many users care if they are replaced and many users want them blocked. Overall, banner ads are annoying (except for Think Geek ads which I often click through to). I would much rather see, in plain text and avertisements like this:

The following article is brought to you by Oracle Corporation. Oracle 9i Release 2 makes Linux Unbreakable. For more information please visit us at www.oracle.com."

A simple ad a couple of lines long with a couple links, no flash, no images, no sound. Have it before the article or after the article on the page. There'd be no reason to block them and to Gator they would be hard to distinguish from the actual article.

This will absolutely defeat Microsoft's claim that Windows NT/2000/XP is ready for the enterprise. Now that the major database systems vendors such as Oracle are supporting Linux, there is simply no reason not to use it. Where's the commercial clustering software for Windows? Oh, right, it's not there - nor is it planned.

BYU is involved in a technology described as "exciting," "cutting edge," and "unbreakable."

It is this "unbreakable" technology that is breaking through countless engineering boundaries.

During my time spent using WebDAV (a year ago with a commercial offering which will remain anonymous) I found Apache's distribution fairly stable, but difficult to install with SSL.

Some of the commercial websites offering a WebDAV based solution use Oracle's Internet File System which includes multiple access methods (HTTP, WebDAV, SMB, and FTP), but may be cost prohibitive.

not quite defunct

Oracle ran a Java Pet Store benchmark to compare the performance of Oracle9iAS and the .NET Pet Shop. ... We found that without caching, Oracle9iAS was up to 18 times faster than Microsoft .NET, while using just half the resources. In addition, Oracle was able to scale to a much higher user load on the same hardware. If we compare the same application using Microsoft's output caching and Oracle's Web Cache, the results are even more dramatic. Using Web Cache, Oracle proved to be more than 22 times faster under load, while the middle tier resource utilization was only a small fraction of that consumed by .NET.

In addition to disclosing the results of this benchmark effort in this paper, Oracle is also providing the source code, a description of the environment in which the tests were run, and the test scripts that were used to simulate this environment. The code and test scripts can be downloaded from the Oracle Technology Network.

If someone needs to know about the Oracle database, I'd point them to tahiti.oracle.com. (And not just because I wrote the code! :-) It's the first system I've used that's been able to entirely take the place of printed docs for a library of any size.

The last time I checked, Oracle was licensed on a per server basis, not on who uses it...

I've been an Oracle developer and DBA for 8 years. And let me tell you, I STILL don't understand Oracle's licensing. It makes no sense, and I think that they keep it that way on purpose to confuse buyers.

Go to http://oraclestore.oracle.com/ and try to buy a database. You'll see "Named User" licenses and "Processor" licenses. And you need a minimum of 10 named user licenses for each processor that the database runs on. Think of it as "connections" to the database. Most Oracle licenses require far more "named user" licenses than 10 -- on an 8-processor Sun machine, you need to purchase licenses for no less than 80 named users. It's confusing, but no where in the article does it actually say that the licenses are "per seat". That's implied in the editorial content at the top of the Slashdot posting.

Also, it wouldn't only be state workers that were connecting to and using the databases. What if the DMV set up Oracle databases with an external web interface that all the citizens of California could use to register motor vehicles?

Oracle is not meant to be used on a per-seat basis anyway. It's meant to be used as the third or fourth tier (back-end data repository) in an n-tier application environment, not installed on a PC on every worker's desk.

Oracle has a database based filesystem Internet File System/IFS that is pretty sweet.

Supports protocols HTTP, WebDAV, SMB, FTP, IMAP, and SMTP gives the ability to store, manage, and search documents, presentations, multimedia, Web pages, and XML files.

Also do Check-in/check-out, version control, and event notification features. Unlike most of the examples i have seen developers can extend these base features to build custom content management applications.

Oracle has a database based filesystem Internet File System/IFS that is pretty sweet.

Supports protocols HTTP, WebDAV, SMB, FTP, IMAP, and SMTP gives the ability to store, manage, and search documents, presentations, multimedia, Web pages, and XML files.

Also do Check-in/check-out, version control, and event notification features. Unlike most of the examples i have seen developers can extend these base features to build custom content management applications.

It's a true (NFS, SMB) mountable filesystem, with all the flexibility that provides, but also the replication and other Enterprise features you want from a database.

The only difference i could see is that all content is stored in a centralized repository(Oracle Db), instead of Microsoft's SQL server in every box strategy.

Consider Oracle running on an OS (Linux, Solaris, Windows, OS/400, whatever). Do you trust the OS more or less than Oracle to have up to date journaling entries regarding the most recent transactions prior to a really bad, catasrophic event that causes an uncontrolled powering down of the server?

Anyway, visit the Oracle 9i DBA Guide to see Oracle's current capabilities in terms of working with raw partitions.

It seems that the idea is not new: IFS
. But Larry is only second to Bill when it comes to ruling the world :)

• IBM with MQSeries
  
• Oracle with AQ
  
• Microsoft with MSMQ
  

I suggest the Feds put the database on Oracle running on a Beowulf cluster of Linux machines, running the newest kernel.

Then Slashdot would LOVE it.

;)

The front page of OracleStore.com has pricing for CPUs and named users, but I don't see any per-MHz prices for Enterprise Edition. Where do you see different pricing for Intel?

The RISC processors used to have a 50% price premium over Intel processors of the same speed, but I don't see that now.

Everybody here knows that you need a 64-bit system, that can address large amounts of contiguous memory, for an effective VLDB.

In this realm, Linux and NT are still in the minor leagues, and guess what Larry said about NT today?

And Microsoft, which to date has not produced any benchmarks that scale beyond 300GB, is nowhere to be found in this high-powered performance arena.

(By the way - this record-setting TPC-H benchmark was set with a Sun E15K.)

• Oracle9i DB
• Oracle9i iAS (Application Server)
• Oracle9i JDeveloper

• Oracle9i DB
• Oracle9i iAS (Application Server)
• Oracle9i JDeveloper

• Oracle9i DB
• Oracle9i iAS (Application Server)
• Oracle9i JDeveloper

As far as I know Oracle 9i is certified for Suse (can't remember which version) and Red Hat 7.1: Red Hat Announces Validation Of Red Hat Linux For Oracle, and I think Red Hat 7.2 is next in line for validation.

Oracle 9i can be downloaded from the Oracle Technology Network (free registration required).

I would assume that it has been and you are missing something based on their partnership with Suse and that according to Oracle there have been more thatn 91,000 copies of Oracle 9i downloaded for linux.

This matrix shows 9i Application Clusters as certified for Linux.

I believe it is impossible to write a completely safe OS or other application: there will always be some way to break into a system. People can only make it harder to do so. Security is only a feeling...

My real question is whether it will not terribly hurt Microsofts reputation when, after declaring their software "safe", somebody manages to break in. Look at Orcale, they declared their 9i suite "unbreakable" but in the meanwhile they have had their share of vulnerability discoveries (like here).

From http://www.oracle.com/ip/deploy/database/oracle9i/ index.html?content.html

The Unbreakable Database Can't break it. Can't break in. Oracle9i Database won't go down if your server fails and won't go down if your site fails. What's more, Oracle holds 14 international security evaluations. IBM DB2 has none. Microsoft SQL Server has only one.

If you *can* break it, which clearly you can, their marketing campaign is untrue. Saying "read the fine print" is making excuses for typical marketingese (or, more likely, Ellisonese). If they still try to say that 9i is "unbreakable," they'll be a laughingstock.

I dunno... I think Larry could take Bill.

Larry looks more than a little like The Rock in this photo. Ever notice how you never see both The Rock and Ellison together at the same time? Hmmm? Coincidence? Perhaps not.

About Oracle

Twenty-five years ago, Larry Ellison saw an opportunity other companies missed when he came across a description of a working prototype for a relational database and discovered that no company had committed to commercializing the technology. Ellison and his co-founders, Bob Miner and Ed Oates, realized there was tremendous business potential in the relational database model--but they may not have realized that they would change the face of business computing forever.

Today Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) is still at the head of the pack. Oracle technology can be found in nearly every industry around the world and in the offices of 98 of the Fortune 100 companies. Oracle is the first software company to develop and deploy 100% internet-enabled enterprise software across its entire product line: database, business applications, and application development and decision support tools. Oracle is the world's leading supplier of software for information management, and the world's second largest independent software company.

Oracle has always been an innovative company. It was one of the first companies to make its business applications available through the internet--today, that idea is pervasive. Now Oracle is committed to making sure that all of its software is designed to work together--the suite approach--and other companies, analysts, and the press are beginning to acknowledge that Oracle is right. What's in store for tomorrow? We will continue to innovate and to lead the industry--while always making sure that we're focused on solving the problems of the customers who rely on our software.

If you work for an Oracle shop, you can use Oracle Internet Directory LDAP, which is based on Oracle's Application Server product. Details here.

MATLAB solves many such problems and is written in C++ (and more recently they use Java, too). ORACLE is a database that is often used for storing and manipulating vast amounts of numerical data. This, too, is written in C++. There are several commercial C++ APIs that provide for heavily optimized complex number operations, polynomial operations, matrix operations, and transforms. Such APIs take advantage of operator overloading to allow straight-forward translation of standard mathematical notation to C++ code using an OOP paradigm.

All of these problems could also have been solved with C programming practices. In fact, the OOP concepts of C++ can be implemented in C manually (that was how C++ started, back in the days of C with Classes and later cfront). The aforementioned projects do not do so for economic reasons; it was cheaper to develop and maintain C++ code. Perhaps your projects are cheaper to develop and maintain under C.

It isn't necessarily Hierarchial. The relationship between a file/folder and its parent folder is obvious. But there is also a relationship between the current contents of the file and the contents as it existed last friday at 1:00pm. There are relationships between the author and the document, the document and the way it was produced, etc, etc.

You should read about Oracle's Internet File System to see what is possible with their technology.

In particular, you could implement nearly-transparent versioning, process control ("my boss must approve this document before I can publish it on the website"), integrated security, etc. In addition, iFS can do full-text-indexing and many other neat things automatically since those features are built into the Oracle database.

On top of that, it is all done in a platform-independent way, and on some platforms (e.g. Windows) it is even completely integrated.

But I imagine a $100,000+ filesystem must be a hard sell. (Of course, it could cost less or much more than that, depending on the server you install it on).

Why yes, this has been done, and you can get it from Oracle, under the name Oracle Internet File System, and I've played with it a bit. Interesting concept, not a very robust implementation, but perhaps it's gotten better since I tried it under 8.1.7? It's kind of neat to be able to mount a drive under windows that's really data in an Oracle table.

At my workplace, we happily develop (and sometimes just generate) web applications using the UIX framework. These are a couple of Java libs which make your life quite easy. Lots of things here which make a good natively compiled user interface are implemented in cross-browser HTML/javascript.

See also Oracle JDeveloper on OTN.

Besides, you can talk all you want. But there's no way you can stop the customer asking for web applications.

You can lose yourself in Linux for hours, tweaking here, updating there. It's great fun if you like that sort of thing. But if you need to produce a document, spreadsheet or presentation

Don't get me started.

No one force you to tweak it if you don't want to. There's always stable version of Linux for production use. The fact that people don't like doing document, spreadsheet or presentation in Linux is the reluctance to learn different ways of doing same things. A Mac user wouldn't like do that in Windows, for example. Your arguement is very misleading.

I must admit MS offers best of the line office suite, but it doesn't mean other office suite is too inferior in comparison.

If you say it's a massive multi-players game, many people are doing serious game playing here.

Sometime I really feel like there's a need to mod some posters as troll or flamebait.

You can run the 11.5 flavour of some of the 20 odd different Oracle applications on Linux, but that does limit you to the Intel platform. Most medium and certainly the majority of large businesses are going to shy away from not using more significant hardware in their server rooms - at least today.

You can't get better business software than Oracle (save me the SAP rant) but unless you have more than $500M USD/year in gross revenues, it may be better to use either Business Online or the Small Business Suite as mentioned earlier.

HTH

Oracle has a small business accounting package that provides just about everything a small business could ask for. It's $99 a month.

http://www.oracle.com/online_services/smallbusines s/index.html?content.html

Larry Ellison offers a free copy of oracle to everyone. It can be found on oracle's website.

Bea (Weblogic 6.1), IBM(Websphere 4.0) and Oracle (9iAs) are all available for trial downloads.
BEA
Oracle
IBM
I recommend Jboss to my customers..

I've done some development with Oracle on Linux and quite a bit on Solaris. Linux seems just as capable an environment for Oracle. I've also spoken to people who have experience scaling Oracle on Linux and have gotten good reviews.

For much more, check out the oracle-on-linux mailing list. And here's a page at Oracle that says Linux is supported "across the entire technology stack".

But I don't want to plug Oracle on Linux too hard. You (for 95% of "you") probably don't really need to pay Ellison's sky high licensing fees. PostgreSQL really is quite good now and more than sufficient for most database applications, most of which barely scratch the surface of Oracle's scalability and capabilities.

I think you may be wrong about Oracle on Linux however. What features (other than client GUIs, which can be run from anywhere) aren't available on Linux? A counter-example: clustering.

I suspect that even if they don't replace Windows in one stroke that they will find many opportunities to reduce costs with Linux.

because it became such a pain to keep track of licenses!

I suppose you were a NT/win95 admin before, and are now a linux admin.

The licensing for a lot of packages under unix (i.e. a real, certified compiler under sun, not gcc) is terrible.

Did you ever try to figure out how much it cost for a oracle deployment in a multi tier environment with ~ 100 users?

That is one reason free software is used, you don't have to report it to the beancounter.

Oracle's JDeveloper 9i release is supposed to have all of the things you mentioned, including CVS support. The addin (plugin) support is supposed to be even better than in 3.2. See http://otn.oracle.com/products/jdev/content.html for more info.

On Windows, I've used Oracle JDeveloper, which is Free(beer) software and can be downloaded from the Oracle Tech Network site if you register. I've mainly used the older version (3.1) for doing JSP work, but it contains some native code and is thus faster. I think Jdeveloper was based on Borland Jbuilder, but I'm not familiar with the new version.

although they aren't a big company by World standards, they are one of the bigger IT Consultancy firms in New Zealand.

Theta specialise in Oracle Systems development and integration and use Oracle 9i RDBMS with Oracle Portal running on SUSE Linux for their extranet. They have some clients running Oracle on Linux as well.

They also do cool stuff with Oracle 9i Lite running applications on iPaq's.

although they aren't a big company by World standards, they are one of the bigger IT Consultancy firms in New Zealand.

Theta specialise in Oracle Systems development and integration and use Oracle 9i RDBMS with Oracle Portal running on SUSE Linux for their extranet. They have some clients running Oracle on Linux as well.

They also do cool stuff with Oracle 9i Lite running applications on iPaq's.

In addition to the links above, most of the big database systems have active Linux ports. Any Oracle, Sybase, Informix or DB2, InterSystems, Poet, or Versant customer is a potential Linux customer.

In addition to the links above, most of the big database systems have active Linux ports. Any Oracle, Sybase, Informix or DB2, InterSystems, Poet, or Versant customer is a potential Linux customer.

When Oracle first started producing their appliance products, they were based on Sun's microkernel.

That has since changed. They are now using Suse Linux for all of their appliances. They work fairly well for what they are designed to do, which is to provide an administratively simple appliance... you don't deal with the OS, ony the Oracle admin interfaces.

Looking at my client list, 4 out of 12 of them are running various Oracle instances in Production on Linux, both Suse (the only officially Oracle supported Linux distro, if I'm not mistaken) and Red Hat. 9 of those 12 run Linux in development environments.

While the Linux deployment has usually been in a development environment, I've seen the trend start to move into Production environments. I think this can be attributed to a number of factors; the maturity/stability of Linux, the cost (hardware and software), the feature set (journalling file systems without having to pay through the nose for Veritas), and the hardware availability.

That and the fact that Oracle offers support for Suse. That is HUGE.

While the bigger companies are still using Solaris and HP-UX for their Oracle needs due to the hardware involved (I have yet to see an E10K run Linux, never mind in production), most of the smaller companies I deal with are running Oracle on Linux in some part of their company.

Also, a number of Oracle's newer integrated development tools (JDeveloper, Enterprise Manager, etc.) are being ported to be 100% Java so that they will (and do) run on Linux.

Oh no...

It's not as if loads of otehr companies do that (those are two that spring to mind immediately, and that I've dealt with in the past)