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If it's free that you're looking for, All of Oracle's software is available free for non-commercial use from Oracle Technet. Furthermore, since this is Slashdot, I'm pretty sure the Linux version of Oracle's DB is available free, regardless of use.

--///--

Ellison's motives come from below.
Look in his eyes. What do they show?
You may think that smile is for the stockholders,
but his home is Hades, where all evil smoulders.

His Chief DBA is the Dark Prince of Lies,
His unholy power is version 9i.
You thought that this baby ate up RAM before?
For version 9i, you'll buy six times more!

What violence will come of these columns and rows?
SQL*plus is the reaper of souls!
To commit is sure folly; to roll-back, calamity.
A cartesian join will doom all of humanity!

Constraints are forged of titanium chains,
and triggers are hardwired into your brain.
A single long int marks your identity --
The mark of the beast is a primary key.

The language of Satan? PL/SQL --
How else would he store his procedures in Hell?
You'll live in dread fear of the keyword DELETE.
The mark of the beast is a primary key.

Oracle 9i is a harbinger of Dark!
(But I cannot say more; nor publish benchmarks.)
But you value your soul, so my words you will heed:
The mark of the beast is a primary key.

--///--

Thank you.

OpenSource is unAmerican. I would write my Congressman if any of our blessed Agencies used that communist software, especially when the economy is hurting. We need to support American software companies in this time of great national crisis. Thank you, and God bless.

I worked for Viisage Technology for a couple of years, and they use a system in the building where two cameras scan for faces in the hallway (as you're approaching to enter) and if a face found matches one in the employee database, it unlocks the door.

It was sophisticated enough to identify me as me even when I was wearing my eyeglasses, and later, when I grew a goatee type beard and moustache. No ID code to enter, no badge to carry. If you didn't match anyone in the database, it would summon security and leave the doors locked.

Having run their Technical Support Department for 2 years, I can tell you that the products not only work, but work very well. They use the facial recognition in Massachusetts at the Department of Transitional Assistance (Welfare) offices to identify those people obtaining multiple ID's under assumed names to weed out Welfare fraud.

The kind of access system they have in their entry could be used in an airport entry to identify a suspected terrorist trying to move about the country and alert security. It's pretty close to an Orwelian concept, except this type of monitoring would definately have oversight by a committee or White House office to prevent civil rights abuses.

I personally am against the idea on principle, but sometimes one principle takes precedence over another.

How is the validation of an individual's identity ensuring his sanity on a flight? If I carry this card, and prove that I am indeed the holder of the thumb and body which the card indicates, what is stopping me from running into the cabin of the plane with a fork, and declaring the plane in the name of Homer Simpson? Nothing.

Stop trying to fill your pockets, Larry, at the expense of the very same freedoms which made you rich.

We have Microsoft trying to pull everyone's personal credit information into Passport and .NET, so they can control where you go, when, and how you get there, and we have Oracle, trying to capture and store and "manage" your very identity. I don't think so.

We also have the DMCA, the SSSCA, backdoored "encryption" (anything with more than one keyholder is not encryption), the RIAA, MPAA, gps tracking devices in rental cars, cameras at every intersection, Dmitry Sklyarov vs. US/Adobe, and traffic tickets being sent in the mail for infractions you were never stopped for.

How is this giving me liberty again?

What people in our government fail to see is that the collection of these events, coupled with those who are trying to restrict stem cell research, our encryption, our liberties, and now, in a very delicate potential time of war, issuing lethal foreign policies. People are leaving this country, and taking off for other places where the opportunities may not be as vast, but the freedoms certainly are.

I'm very close to taking off as well, before the borders are closed, and I have to show my passport, fingerprint, and biometric validation, along with government approval to leave this country, and I'm taking all of my loved ones with me.

(the first gameboy one was ok I guess... haven't played the new ones)

Zelda 7: Oracle of Seasons and Zelda 8: Oracle of Ages are brought to you by the company that makes the world's most popular really expensive database management system.

Oracle's corporate site

Oracle's technical site (marketing)- free downloads, product demos, documentation requires free login

Oracle's technical site (technical) bug fixes, patchs obtaining some content requires valid license key.

Oracle's corporate site

Oracle's technical site (marketing)- free downloads, product demos, documentation requires free login

Oracle's technical site (technical) bug fixes, patchs obtaining some content requires valid license key.

Oracle's corporate site

Oracle's technical site (marketing)- free downloads, product demos, documentation requires free login

Oracle's technical site (technical) bug fixes, patchs obtaining some content requires valid license key.

I could be wrong. There might be a ton of Oracle support for Tru64, but as an Oracle customer, I sure don't see it. At my current job, we just started to create an Oracle environment. I asked the pre-sales tech. support for their recommendation on platform, since we had to buy all the hardware anyway (and I was already unhappy with Windows NT/2000). They pushed Solaris and Windows 2000 (in that order). Tru64 was never mentioned. Not wanting to re-experience the orphan support level as in their VMS offering, I was only too happy to pick Solaris. If I told them I already had a Tru64 server and was considering buying their database for it, I'm sure they would have told me how good their Tru64 product support is (and maybe it really is).

Alpha may be a better chip than Itanium or SPARC II. Tru64 may be a better OS than Solaris or Linux. But at the end of the day, Oracle is making the sale for SPARC II/Solaris. Press release or no press release, it remains to be seen if Oracle intends to support Tru64 the same way they support Solaris.

I took a tour of this lab last Fall. While it was impressive from a consumer usability perspective, the technical decisions they made were at times curious. Like Microsoft, IBM sees the home of the future as a collection of dumb appliances that are dependent on a big, smart server to operate. Microsoft sees the server as the Windows XP platform, while IBM sees it as some form of their Websphere application server.

So there were no peer-to-peer technologies like IEEE 1394 or JINI to be found in their lab. And no Bluetooth or X-10, either.

In fact, the connection technology of the future, if the PvC lab is to belived... is CeBus! Now, CeBus is mighty fine at what it does, and fits well into IBM's architecture where everything is controlled by a Websphere set-top box, but it is much more expensive than the competing technologies. Right now, I can't see anyone (except Larry) paying a couple of hundred bucks extra for blinders that go up and down at different times in the day.

Corby

Yes, but the article implies that they're likely to call it the Redhat Database. That would lead to the equally confusing RDB acronym...

• select c.name
• 
  from customer c
  where c.id in (select cl.id
  from collections cl
  where cl.debt > 0)
  

Not to be nitpicky, but you mention providing marketable skills & performance isn't the issue. If Java is a slow performer, wouldn't it tend to hurt students more learning a language that is slow, and klunky? Last I checked, there were plenty of jobs available for C & C++ programmers. I have a feeling that Java may be a fad, and C/C++ will be around and fall back in favor unless Java really takes off.

Java lets you do some cool stuff, and it lets you do some really klunky stuff, but it isn't designed for performance. Any industry that is CPU bound (Simulation, number crunching, gaming, local applications, etc.) needs to be coded to run fast. Industries that are network bound (ISP's, ASP's, Portals, etc.) don't really care about how much the CPU is choking because the network is the bottleneck. I have a feeling, once the network is no longer the bottleneck, Java either better get fast quick, or it's going to be going back to C/C++ for speed.

1. Java's not slow and klunky. I don't know when the last time you looked at Java was (it must have been years ago), but it is fast and getting faster. There are some optimization tricks you can do to code at runtime that can't work with a static compiler.
2. C++ lets you do some really klunky stuff, too - more, I would argue. There's no cure for incompetent programming.
3. Java isn't just taking off, it's already taken off. The base of Java developers and companies using Java for enterprise-critical applications is growing in direct proportion to C++'s falloff rate. Java isn't a fad, it's the language of the future. You can bury your head in the sand all you want, but that's the way it is. I'm sure lots of COBOL programmers thought C was just a fad, too.
4. Java's making huge inroads in graphics performance and I/O speed, which is where it's always been slowest, especially in the upcoming Merlin release (J2SE 1.4). I won't pretend that you could write Quake III in Java yet, but you could probably write Quake I. Computation speed has never really been the problem. After all, even Fortran has great number-crunching capability, but nobody would use it for serious enterprise-type applications.
5. Java's great strengths are binary portability, syntactic simplicity, and standard, supported APIs for everything under the sun. C++ doesn't even have an ABI standard that everyone plays with yet, let alone standard networking, graphics, and GUI libraries. Any industry that doesn't want portable, maintainable, extensible code is better off out of business.

Obligatory flamebait disclaimer: I don't think C and C++ are going away, or that Java is the One True Language. However, it is ridiculous to assert that Java is slow, poorly adopted, or unsuited to real-world applications in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Very serious companies like Oracle, Sybase, IBM, Macromedia/Allaire, Borland and of course Sun, are banking lots of money on Java's success, recognizing that it's a mature, robust, stable, fast language for very serious development.

This makes me tempted set up DB2, then take up Oracle on it's million dollar challenge

Oracle offers some sample code for building a document management system with version control using Oracle IFS here.

Like one of these?

Not actually Linux, but pretty much what you mean.

Actually, it is. Check the Oracle Docs.

Not to mention Oracle Reports.

What about Oracle's Internet File System (iFS)? At the O/S level, you'd just configure a bunch of multi-GB database files. Then all the file objects would be stored in the database, with full search capabilities there.

I think gamers of all ages can enjoy games like Zelda

Background: All games marketed as "Zelda" have a character named Link as the hero. Three of them have rescuing Princess Zelda as one of the main objectives (Z1 and Z2 final objective; Z3 first objective). Calling Z4 (Link's Awakening) a "Zelda" game is just wrong; where does she appear? To use the terminology of NetBSD, Z4 is a "Zelda-like" game.

Z5 for N64, Z6 for N64Plus, and the Oracle series for GBC: Haven't looked at them too closely; they came out after I became a PC gamer.

This is particularly likely if they decide to re-engineer the product's kernel to be more object-oriented. Oracle's attempts at adding object features to its database started at 7.3 with user defined data types, got a huge boost at version 8.0 with user-defined object types, and another kick forward in 8i (8.1) with the internal Java engine. But it's all just grafted onto a relational kernel that hasn't changed significantly since version 7. (The rumor is that Oracle's developers are afraid to touch it for fear of breaking something, so all new features are bolted on using PL/SQL packages.)

So, let's say they rewrite the kernel from the ground up and give it a new name. It becomes the flagship product, and that clears the way for Oracle to release the older source code to whomever wants it. They'd be making most of their money on subscriptions to their online apps anyway.

OK, you have that "effective SMP" web cluster of maybe 100s of machines. Fine. Now what's your database server?

This is also an Athlon cluster. Specifically, an Oracle8i Enterprise Edition Parallel Server cluster. (MySQL doesn't seem to support clustering.)

ie. is it goatsex that is leading the way?
Or is it plain Jane erotica?
Or do people simply not care as long as it's free?

That's the kind of metrics I care about. Maybe we could loosen the religious right's hold on America if we could show that, indeed, most people in this country are depraved lunatics. After all we are a D E M O C R A C Y right?

Steven

Here's another good pleistocene man link too. There's a lot more info as you browse through the site.

There is something interesting at www.oracle.com/guarantee/.

Not only DID we pay this ammount for the pentiumII install, but I used their web site to generate the other figure of the ppro180. Keep in mind this is for a web site and not a developers license. Thats how they getcha.

Apparently they getcha by confusing some people into paying more than they need to.

Go to store.oracle.com. Look at the bottom-left of the main content area (Oracle 8i Standard Edition). Select Universal Power Unit Perpetual from the popup. Enter 800 (that's your dual-processor 400MHz) into the little "Units" box. Click "buy."

The total comes to $10,800. That's the Oracle database server, with a permanent license for that machine. If you only need a 2-year license, it's about 1/3 of that amount.

If this is all too complicated, just click the "Questions about how to license your product?" link off to the left, where it is explained in depth.

I'd be interested to hear how you managed to price it to $250k.

The actual link is here and it's not just for MS SQL Server. They specifically mention BEA and IBM, probably 2 of the biggest players.
They only will help tune the site if it "out of the box" does not run 3x faster.
I think its a hella fine claim, even if they do use it just to strip more licences and force their recommendations down your throat. With the big boys always fighting over the max throughput who wouldn't want to run your site 3x faster?

I've priced a 2x ppro180 and my company bought oracle for a client for a dual 400 pentium II, both for a public web server, and both prices were about $200,000-250,000 dollars.

Was this amortized out to the Second Coming? Oracle Standard Edition on that hardware is a few thousand dollars a year - less than many people spend on lunch. To spend $250,000 you'd need to purchase the perpetual license (no recurring fees other than optional support) and install it on over 20 dual-400 servers.

Why not check their web site before making wildly incorrect pronouncements?

I see their ads for a $1,000,000 guarantee that Oracle 8 will 3x be faster than your existing server.

The challenge is at Oracle's site here and it mentions only Microsoft SQL server 7.0 against Oracle 8i.

If Oracle was to open it up to other RDBMSes such as Sybase, Informix and DB2/UDB, they would be broke paying folks (including myself) the million dollar prize.

MS SQL server is limited by the hardware that it can run on, so it is at a severe disadvantage to other RDBMSes...

Oracle's challenge is nothing more than a marketing ploy, albeit a good one.


---
Interested in the Colorado Lottery?

In my limited experience, MySQL is faster at doing simple things than any other database out there.

When you're programming a web-based app, where response times are critical, MySQL may actually be a better choice than Oracle, even if you do a hybrid solution, with MySQL used for quick lookups and Oracle doing the back end transactional heavy lifting.

Notice that the Oracle $1,000,000 speed guarantee only applies to DB2, WebLogic and MS SQL Server, NOT Mysql or Postgres.

Turloch

Turloch

Well, first of all most web developers today not only don't care about HTML - they don't exactly know what the HTML is (besides that it is a file format that is produced by their visual web creation tools when they click on "save"). The sad truth is that the "web empowering" of the masses (that I remember Tim O'Reilly speaking of in '97) takes place with FrontPage Express and ASP in Personal Web Servers on Windows and not VI and Perl on Linux as many of us have hoped back then.

Second, when it comes to presenting the content from web pages/services on various devices then there are tools that allow extracting the content from a web page (even IE oriented one) and presenting it in another markup language (like WML or a limited subset of HTML which is what most types of such devices use). One example of such a tool is the Oracle's Portal-to-Go product (currently sold as Oracle AS 9i WE). It is basically an XML based translation engine that on demand creates pages in various markup languages based on content from various sources including web pages and services. All it takes to add a new markup language on the output side is to add a new XSL that produces that language from the internal simple XML format. This tool is currently used mostly by cell-phone operators to create WML and Palm oriented portals from various web pages.

Why I wrote all this? To suggest that it might be a an option for a company that provides TV-web-surfing to use a tool like this rather than try to force millions of web page designers to comply with standards they don't even know of.

see IFS for an overview of oracles IFS.

or look at MS Vaporware Presentation to learn about ms plans in this area (powerpoint presentation unfortunately..)

the idea has definitely merit, and as others have pointed out, the possibilities are quite intriguing..

The real strength of something like this would be in a corporate environment, where having a dbfs would simplify file management a great deal.

A while back (a year maybe?) Oracle announced their iFS product. Dubbed the Internet file system, it gave file system, IMAP, POP, FTP, and web access to the database through a common software. I haven't had the chance to work with it, and it still may not even be available, but to be able to store files in the database and enforce integrity, it's extremely easy to track revisioning, maintain lists, and perform searches and reports. It seems like wonderful technology that should be a part of every OS, but I'm curious as to performance. Has anyone had any experience with iFS?

A while back (a year maybe?) Oracle announced their iFS product. Dubbed the Internet file system, it gave file system, IMAP, POP, FTP, and web access to the database through a common software. I haven't had the chance to work with it, and it still may not even be available, but to be able to store files in the database and enforce integrity, it's extremely easy to track revisioning, maintain lists, and perform searches and reports. It seems like wonderful technology that should be a part of every OS, but I'm curious as to performance. Has anyone had any experience with iFS?

Essentially, they're a means of querying a database (potentially, distributed among a plurality of sites in the case of parallel DB's) for image content, presenting the results as thumbnails and permitting links back to the original images. They also provided the capability to query by drawing/doodle and by color distribution in the image.

Be sure to send e-Bay feedback about any other prior art that would definitely turn their application into an organizational embarrassment. Stuff like Oracle interMedia or any given imaging product library from Xerox PARC.

It's only fair, I should think...I mean, they probably have no clue how open they are to a world-class stomping by the largest organizations in the industry...

Most big comercial applications have their fair share of bugs, and it is very rare that they will fix them for you in the current release (the notable exception i know of being Oracle who once offered to supply an immediate fix for a bug I found in a company I was working for at the time). If you find a bug your best bet is to generally goto the web-site, check their bug lists and hope someone has a workaround for you to use. Then you can put your code back the way it was supposed to be when the next release is available.

The same holds true for linux, if you find a bug you try and find documentation on it and any workarounds. If you want to fix it yourself fine (though I dont see many peoples bosses agreeing to test a change to a linux kernel for a bug fix one of their in house developers made, let alone undertake to support that version of the kernel on an ongoing basis). So you hack around the bug the same as you do anything else. Luckily most linux apps have a higher turnaround than commercial apps so often the bug fix will be available quicker.

I would say however that the lack of a stable java vm and things like application servers is a bigger consideration for a lot of large enterprise jobs since a lot of big companys want an EJB solution these days.

This PDF is from the Oracle Technet site, and is somewhat OCP-centric, but a lot of the points made would apply to other types of IT certification IMHO:

IT Professional Certification Myth and Fact Sheet

YS.

If thinknic is like that, it can't fail.

But you get what you pay for, dont you. And we all know how unreliable and unstable apache is, right? You had better go and shell out some cash to Netscape or somebody else if you want a reliable webserver. Please!

Just because Mr Ellison wants to drink your blood after he has raped your bank account, does not mean that his product is infallible. Having said that, anybody who knows their db's would have to agree though that Oracle does do a rather nice job.

But I will support MySQL till the day it bombs out and is not recoverable (this has not happened to me in 5 years). I will do it simply to say fuck you to Larry and simply because I cannot afford to buy him a new tennis court and simply because if we all support MySQL now, one day when transactions, stored procedures and row-level locking are implemented we can all take the money we saved by not buying oracle and have a big party and not invite the fools who still think that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys.

Lets all say it together: O-P-E-N--S-O-U-R-C-E.

and the Internships page itself:
http://www.oracle.com/college/jobs_int.html

Disclaimer: I work for Oracle and like it here, so I am probably biased!

and the Internships page itself:
http://www.oracle.com/college/jobs_int.html

Disclaimer: I work for Oracle and like it here, so I am probably biased!

and the Internships page itself:
http://www.oracle.com/college/jobs_int.html

Disclaimer: I work for Oracle and like it here, so I am probably biased!

Show you boss this if he is looking for performance http://www.oracle.com/guarantee/index.html?content .html. Oracle claims they have it and are offering one million beautiful dollars if they don't. They say that they can beat IBM and Microsoft solutions hands down. BTW their app server runs Apache for http.

Also many years ago I did a lot of work with Ingres's OpenRoad which used to be called Windows4GL. It's basically a GUI-builder/runtime product that uses its own 4GL and a lot of OO concepts to implement client-server systems. I'm not sure what it's evolved into the past few years, but it's worth checkin out.

These are some of the questions that come up to my mind:

Be able to migrate IIS to Apache first, and still be able to access the MSSQL databases (FreeTDS?)

Use a scripting syntax similar to ASP so that the programmers don't have much of a headache learning new stuff (PHP looks like a solution).

Java Server Pages will solve both problems. Sun has worked very closely with the Apache project on making JSP run well under Apache including giving away code and contributing to projects a la Tomcat. Here's a site to give you a quick overview of JSP.

Migrate MSSQL 7 to MySQL, PostgreSQL or other (Which one is better for web development?)

Depends on what kind of Web development you are doing. For the kind of work I have done which is both mission critical (eliminating MySQL) and requires speed (eliminating PostgreSQL) commercial databases have always been the correct solution to solve my problem. Both IBM's DB2 and Oracle 8i are available for Linux and are also very friendly with Apache and Java.

If your site does not traffic in mission critical data (e.g. a bank, major e-commerce company) then MySQL may be the solution that you seek. It is quick, fairly easy to use and heck, slashdot uses it.

Web log reports (I need to generate reports on the web site usage. What weblog report generators are available for Linux? Which ones do you use? Are there any that generate graphs, charts, etc..?)

Look on Freshmeat.


(-1 Troll)