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The Health Department of Western Australia has built a custom system for their Rural hospitals called HCARe (bizzare caps on purpose) that they run on SCO OpenServer and which is probably Linux compatible. I'm uncertain if they decided to build it themselves because they were unable to find a suitable OpenSource program or simply because of politics, however the system has the advantage of being able to be rebuilt on demand according to indivdual needs. The metro hospitals use commercial systems such as Oracle that have been bought 'off the shelf' and then customised. As for your Linux web server, have a look at E-Smith Linux , it's so easy to setup and administrate it's criminal. :) Hope this helps, SeaWolf

1. The new American Express credit cards use Java Card(TM) technology. That's right, American Express credit cards now run Java. Here's an
2. interview with the CIO of Amex.

1. Both
2. Oracle 8i and IBM's DB2 use Java extensively both for their DB administration GUIs as well as for middleware code. If you didn't know, these are the number 1 and number 2 Enterprise database systems in the world

1. Java servlets and JSP are used extensively on the web from sites like
2. mail.com to Firstunion.com. Hundreds of sites use Java(TM) to deliver dynamic content these two are simply the most prominent that come to mind.

1. Personal Java(TM) runs on
2. millions of settop cable boxes in the United States.

Just a thought - you could deploy something that is, in-fact, mission critical on Linux/ix86 - and it wouldn't even cost an arm and a leg. (Just a leg, perhaps.)

See:
Mission Critical Linux
Oracle

As I see it there are 3 main issues with migrating from one RDBMS to another:

• Migrating data.
• Migrating packages (ie processes such as triggers that run within the database).
• Skills Transfer

On the first one you really have two choices. If you can extract the data as Comma-Separated-Variable or fixed field width files then you can use SQL*Loader to perform the upload. Alternatively Oracle do supply a Migration Workbech product that can help semiautomate the process, more details can be found here.

Packages running within the database (I must admit I don't know if Sybase has these) will probably need to be rewritten for the new RDBMS. In favour of Oracle it is now possible to write these in Java as a JVM is now included as part of the basic install of the server, I believe that it is Java 2 as of Oracle 8.1.6 but you would have to confirm this with Oracle themselves. Release 3 of Oracle 8i definately supports Java 2 API and includes XML support and Apache bundled within the database according to this page. Try searching the Oracle Corporate Website for further details.

Oracle uses the SQL-92 (ie ANSI) SQL for those areas that it covers, as has been quite rightly pointed out the extensions will differ from RDBMS to RDBMS. There are a lot of very good books available for Oracle which cover everything from introducing a total newbie upto assisting someone skilled in another RDBMS to transfer to Oracle. Try O'Reilly or Amazon for some good examples.

I hope that this is helpful

Stephen

As I see it there are 3 main issues with migrating from one RDBMS to another:

• Migrating data.
• Migrating packages (ie processes such as triggers that run within the database).
• Skills Transfer

On the first one you really have two choices. If you can extract the data as Comma-Separated-Variable or fixed field width files then you can use SQL*Loader to perform the upload. Alternatively Oracle do supply a Migration Workbech product that can help semiautomate the process, more details can be found here.

Packages running within the database (I must admit I don't know if Sybase has these) will probably need to be rewritten for the new RDBMS. In favour of Oracle it is now possible to write these in Java as a JVM is now included as part of the basic install of the server, I believe that it is Java 2 as of Oracle 8.1.6 but you would have to confirm this with Oracle themselves. Release 3 of Oracle 8i definately supports Java 2 API and includes XML support and Apache bundled within the database according to this page. Try searching the Oracle Corporate Website for further details.

Oracle uses the SQL-92 (ie ANSI) SQL for those areas that it covers, as has been quite rightly pointed out the extensions will differ from RDBMS to RDBMS. There are a lot of very good books available for Oracle which cover everything from introducing a total newbie upto assisting someone skilled in another RDBMS to transfer to Oracle. Try O'Reilly or Amazon for some good examples.

I hope that this is helpful

Stephen

As I see it there are 3 main issues with migrating from one RDBMS to another:

• Migrating data.
• Migrating packages (ie processes such as triggers that run within the database).
• Skills Transfer

On the first one you really have two choices. If you can extract the data as Comma-Separated-Variable or fixed field width files then you can use SQL*Loader to perform the upload. Alternatively Oracle do supply a Migration Workbech product that can help semiautomate the process, more details can be found here.

Packages running within the database (I must admit I don't know if Sybase has these) will probably need to be rewritten for the new RDBMS. In favour of Oracle it is now possible to write these in Java as a JVM is now included as part of the basic install of the server, I believe that it is Java 2 as of Oracle 8.1.6 but you would have to confirm this with Oracle themselves. Release 3 of Oracle 8i definately supports Java 2 API and includes XML support and Apache bundled within the database according to this page. Try searching the Oracle Corporate Website for further details.

Oracle uses the SQL-92 (ie ANSI) SQL for those areas that it covers, as has been quite rightly pointed out the extensions will differ from RDBMS to RDBMS. There are a lot of very good books available for Oracle which cover everything from introducing a total newbie upto assisting someone skilled in another RDBMS to transfer to Oracle. Try O'Reilly or Amazon for some good examples.

I hope that this is helpful

Stephen

If you want to know more about Oracle on Linux then check out Oracle Technet. You will need to set upo a login but then can view documentation and download development versions to try out.

It does have a fairly hefty disk foot print (about 600Mb IIRC).

Oracle should be able to handle, in terms of size, whatever the hardware can handle. It also supports raw volumes.

Stephen

Oracle 8.1.6 for linux is currently is oracles top download.

What else should we be doing in the linux/open source area?

Our product (Oracle Migration Workbench, free from Oracle Technology Network ) currently runs on windows but can migrate, SQLserver, Sybase and Access to Oracle on Linux (using Oracle networking connectivity), we are working on SQLAnywhere and mysql (next up is Informix) we may do Postgress if there is demand. There are other facilities for migration, e.g. Oracle transparent gateways and flat files for data migration (imported to Oracle using sqlldr), and some unsupported toolkits/migration documentation on OTN. Data from oracle on other platforms can be transfered to Oracle on Linux using exp and imp (shipped with Oracle server).

totierne@hotmail.com

wrong, you still need to the license..... that's considered a concentrator... You can find it somewhere on M$ /sql site

Plus, you need one "per processor", IIRC..

Still, it's cheaper than Oracle. By their weird licensing a two-year license of 8i on our dual 550mhz sql server would be $289,000... i'll take the less than $4,000 for SQL, thanks.
---

Oracle Forms is a GUI builder for a wide range of operating systems, it's easy to use and quite powerful.

You can download most of the Oracle products for personal/development work too...

Oracle plays a central role in your current toolkit. Have you considered switching to an an open-source database?

There is no open-source replacement for a true enterprise-level RDBMS. MySQL and PostgresSQL are as close as you can get; neither is a viable alternative to Oracle, Sybase, or DB2 (or even MS SQL Server). Given the complexity of modern database software, and the highly specialized knowledge needed to write it, I don't see the open-source community coming up with an enterprise-class RDBMS any time soon. Phil explains his choice of Oracle on his web site.

That being said, Oracle is a very expensive piece of software, and is a tempremental beast to configure and support. Oracle 8i for Linux can be downloaded for free (free registration required), but AFIK you have to pay for a licence if you use it in a production enviornment. Also, it is a practical impossiblity to run an Oracle installation without a full-time, knowledgable DBA. The high expense of the software and the salary of a DBA makes Oracle infeasable for small businesses or those on a limited budget. Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 11.0.3 for Linux is gratis for both production and development; ASE 11.9.2 is gratis for development but requires a paid licence for production deployment. ASE 12.0 hasn't been ported to Linux (yet). ASE, while easier to administer than Oracle (IMHO), still requires a knowledgable DBA. Sybase Adaptive Server Anywhere (ASA) (the database engine behind SQL Anywhere Studio) requires far less knowlege to administer, making it far more suitable for small operations. Free evaluation versions of SQL Anywhere Studio are available for Linux, Unix, and Windows.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

Oracle plays a central role in your current toolkit. Have you considered switching to an an open-source database?

There is no open-source replacement for a true enterprise-level RDBMS. MySQL and PostgresSQL are as close as you can get; neither is a viable alternative to Oracle, Sybase, or DB2 (or even MS SQL Server). Given the complexity of modern database software, and the highly specialized knowledge needed to write it, I don't see the open-source community coming up with an enterprise-class RDBMS any time soon. Phil explains his choice of Oracle on his web site.

That being said, Oracle is a very expensive piece of software, and is a tempremental beast to configure and support. Oracle 8i for Linux can be downloaded for free (free registration required), but AFIK you have to pay for a licence if you use it in a production enviornment. Also, it is a practical impossiblity to run an Oracle installation without a full-time, knowledgable DBA. The high expense of the software and the salary of a DBA makes Oracle infeasable for small businesses or those on a limited budget. Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 11.0.3 for Linux is gratis for both production and development; ASE 11.9.2 is gratis for development but requires a paid licence for production deployment. ASE 12.0 hasn't been ported to Linux (yet). ASE, while easier to administer than Oracle (IMHO), still requires a knowledgable DBA. Sybase Adaptive Server Anywhere (ASA) (the database engine behind SQL Anywhere Studio) requires far less knowlege to administer, making it far more suitable for small operations. Free evaluation versions of SQL Anywhere Studio are available for Linux, Unix, and Windows.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

_________________________________________

can anyone point me to a real-world application or website that actually uses Java? I mean properly, not just a tiny applet showing the time or something.

Off the top of my head, let me see Mail.com uses Java to serve its pages. Does Oracle's new Enterprise database count?

And from Sun's page of industry news, we have companies like RSA, Oracle, Netcom, SAAB, Delta Air etc. using Java in mission critical situations on a daily basis.
Posts like this make me wonder about who composes slashdot's readership. Because only script kiddies and so-called web developers (HTML and javascript kiddies) use Java as a web app language. Also no one in his right mind uses Java for GUI development if the application has any degree of complexity. But as a middleware development language it is practically untouchable. When it comes to speed of development, maintainability and expandability for business applications few things beat Java. Add a native GUI or web interface depending on your application and a rock solid app has been created.

PS: Myth dispel mode Oh yeah, by the way Java pages are faster or at the very least as fast as CGI, it has to do with being memory resident a la the VM as opposed to being read from disk. Here's a benchmark and a link or two.

Oracle used to offer "Trusted Oracle" which was supposed to impliment this. I never used it myself and may have mis-understood the product. I heard it was quite the resource hog and rather complicated to use.

This product was apparently included in Oracle 8i

See This PDF

And in a related story....

I really like this press release from Oracle comparing linux to a chia pet. I thought it was kind of funny.

Ben

How come it seems that the people that think that IP laws and patents are dumb are also the same people that have no IP or patents of their own? I'd be much more interested in these arguments if people or companies like Apple, IBM, Intel, Microsoft etc all came forward and said they thought that existing patent and IP laws should be done away with.

I have co-filed patents. I thought they were stupid things to patent, but they were done for defensive reasons. Oh, what was that, you wanted statements from large software companies? Well, here is an incredibly powerful and direct statement from Oracle that falsifies your claim. I would also point out that an increasing amount of code from companies like IBM and Apple is being unburdened from the usual IP restrictions. Standards and openness are good for innovators.

I'm sure there are other companies, top talent, and management who feel the same way, but who don't have the courage to step forward. Granted, Bill Gates and Scott McNealy are probably not among them.

Let me start off by saying that designing N-tier applications is very difficult; it's a new art and there are not a lot of hard and fast rules. There are many different approaches to take, and not all are appropriate for every circumstance -- a great deal depends on the specific usage characteristics of your system.

With that in mind, your first step to take is to move your database server and web server to seperate boxes. Just doing this gives you a huge performance boost. Also, it's nearly impossible to properly tune the performance of an enterprise-class database server unless it's on a dedicated box. The most important thing on your db server is to have lots of RAM - ideally, you want your entire database to be cached; if it's too big, then you at least want to have the most frequently accessed tables & indexes cached.

Secondly, use only stored procedures to access the database. Stored procedures can give you a huge performance gain over ad-hoc SQL statements. Also, forcing all db access to go thru stored procs makes it much easier to secure your database and to do performance profiling.

I'm not familiar with MySQL, so I can't really say if it's up to the task or not. Both Sybase and Oracle have versions of their enterprise db servers available for Linux. Sybase 11.5 for Linux is gratis for both production and development; 11.9.2 is gratis for development, but needs to be licensed for a production system. I don't know off the top of my head what Oracle's licensing policy is. Of the two, I personally prefer Sybase - I think it's easier to administer, and has a more elegant architecture.

Lastly, you need to take a close look at what kinds of transactions are running most often, and optimize your indexing strategy for those transactions. Take a close look at the locking behavior and see if you are getting a lot of locking contention -- this can be a real performance killer.

On the web server side, I don't see anything wrong with using Java servlets / JSP's over any other competing technique. Typically, the bottleneck in this kind of system is physical I/O, not CPU; so the slight performance gain you would get from using native code vs Java would not help you, particuarly if you're using a current JVM with a good JIT compiler. If you are maxxing out the CPU utilization on the web server, you might want to consider moving some of the logic from your servlets into stored procedures, balancing the load better between the db and web servers.

I wouldn't start looking at clustering options until I was sure I was getting all the performace I could get out of my existing web & db servers.

"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

The vast majority of data in databases is relational, which means no hierarchies which are what "come naturally" to XML. Consequently, databse vendors (thats relational database vendors) are focussing on mediating data access via XML rather than data storage. There are various XML-and-database tools available for example Oracle's XSQL Servlet,and I know that DB2 offers storage support for XML documents (as in store an XML document in the database, not use XML to store relational data)but a lot more work needs to be done on data modelling and querying with XML in mind before it'll be ready for prime time as a database format (Speaking of which you might want to take a look at Lore and XML-QL )

Anonymous coward said:Could you give some precise references so we can add this to the demythification list, please?

To give just a few examples:

• Whistle Communications - Netgraph, IPFW (firewall) improvements, soft updates porting, numerous bugfixes, mpd.
• Plutotech - CAM, including the full SCSI subsystem of FreeBSD.
• NetMax - Volumization and extended RAID support
• Oracle's Network Computing - significant work on the VM system
• Pavilion Internet and Yes Interactive - Improvement of the ISDN system so it can integrate with the standard userland PPP in FreeBSD

This is just a short list off the top of my head. There are a lot of other cases.

Eivind.

Perhaps I should provide a few more details about our network, so I can justify the the design decisions that went into it.

We have about 250GB - in about 200,000 files - available on four servers. At this point, having a cleverly designed directory structure is no longer a viable solution for organizing our documents across the enterprise, and an additional layer of abstraction is needed so users can locate the files they need.
Enterprise Document Management Systems are applications that usually sit on top of an RDBMS and allow search, check-in check-out, version control, and other features beyond what a file server can do. Since we already have an Oracle ERP solution installed here, we went with their EDMS product, but there are certainly others available (most notably from Xerox and Eastman-Kodak, although recently I've wondered how suitable CVS would be for such a task).

By the way, I think the biggest CAD file I found on our servers was ~400MB, and it was a Pro/Engineer drawing of a component that could fit in the palm of your hand. After a six-month campaign of trying to ration disk usage by our employees, only to be voted down by higher-ups, I have resigned myself to the fact that I will be adding disk storage to these servers forever. Network Appliance is starting to look real good...

In the majority of cases, if not all, the use of frames can be replaced by nested tables. And there is an increasing trend to do this.

Using tables instead of frames will increase the number of potential users who can make sense of your website. If you have a frames based website, you should also provide a non-frames version out of consideration for people using a browser that doesn't support frames.

Anyone authoring a website with Frontpage (ugggh) will invariably have a frame based website when they don't need to. This means that a lot of mom and pop websites, as well as small commercial websites have frames.

Larger commercial sites are tending to not use frames unless they have a really good reason. Look at the source code for sites such as Oracle TechNet, Wired, and About.com for examples of sites that use tables over frames. Interestingly, Oracle Technet has only recently made the change and Oracle still uses frames.

Many commercial software packages for website design favour tables over frames. Macromedia Dreamweaver will do this I think, although their site uses frames.

Webmonkey has a good guide to how to construct frames, but the article does say
ask yourself: Do I really need frames at all? Most of the time, the answer is no. In my opinion, frames are only appropriate when you have a complex navigation structure going on - especially one that involves retaining a search query while reloading the search results (as in Cocktail or Net Surf Central).

At the end of the day the person you've hired has been asked to provide functionality into your existing web site, and while they shouldn't be stopped from making suggestions on how to improve your site, they do have a job to do. I'd be surprised if having frames actually prevents functionality being added.

In the majority of cases, if not all, the use of frames can be replaced by nested tables. And there is an increasing trend to do this.

Using tables instead of frames will increase the number of potential users who can make sense of your website. If you have a frames based website, you should also provide a non-frames version out of consideration for people using a browser that doesn't support frames.

Anyone authoring a website with Frontpage (ugggh) will invariably have a frame based website when they don't need to. This means that a lot of mom and pop websites, as well as small commercial websites have frames.

Larger commercial sites are tending to not use frames unless they have a really good reason. Look at the source code for sites such as Oracle TechNet, Wired, and About.com for examples of sites that use tables over frames. Interestingly, Oracle Technet has only recently made the change and Oracle still uses frames.

Many commercial software packages for website design favour tables over frames. Macromedia Dreamweaver will do this I think, although their site uses frames.

Webmonkey has a good guide to how to construct frames, but the article does say
ask yourself: Do I really need frames at all? Most of the time, the answer is no. In my opinion, frames are only appropriate when you have a complex navigation structure going on - especially one that involves retaining a search query while reloading the search results (as in Cocktail or Net Surf Central).

At the end of the day the person you've hired has been asked to provide functionality into your existing web site, and while they shouldn't be stopped from making suggestions on how to improve your site, they do have a job to do. I'd be surprised if having frames actually prevents functionality being added.

Oops, I forgot

• Oracle supports Linux for their basic database and application servers. I don't use the Oracle ERP products so I'm not sure, but they do not seem to be supported.

Oops, I forgot

• Oracle supports Linux for their basic database and application servers. I don't use the Oracle ERP products so I'm not sure, but they do not seem to be supported.

I think there is an ODBC driver for MySQL. Write an Access Macro that rips yer tables from and crams them through the ODBC handle in Access. If that doesn't git you goin' Try Oracle 8i for Linux. If ya can't get yer ODBC to talk to a Oracle database, you've got bigger problems than just MDB files...

The key to making EROS useful to people running Linux would be to build a "GNU System" atop EROS, parallelling building a "GNU System" atop the Linux kernel.

(Note that I usually call "systems based on the Linux kernel" by the moniker Linux; the use of the RMS term happens to be usefully descriptive here; I'm not trying to do any politically-motivated Newsspeak here.)

I would tend to think that the Debian folks would be the most prepared to create an overall system atop EROS, as they have both

• A set of automated tools for constructing and (to some extent) validating sets of packages, and
• Some experience trying to fit Debian to a non-Linux kernel, namely Hurd

The major alternative that, based on the deployment of predecessor systems like KeyKOS, is likely to take place quite a bit, is that EROS might instead be largely used to construct "somewhat embedded systems" rather than the general purpose system that comes from installing the typical Linux distribution.

This might include:

• Building a really secure little web server package
• Building a really secure little file server package
• Building a really secure network firewall system
• Building a really secure Network Computer
• Building a secure and fast database server

  Which would parallel what Oracle has been working on with the "Raw Iron" Oracle 8i Appliance

I'd kind of like to see both approaches, as that is the most likely way for EROS to become more widely used.

Actually, I had a good reason for using one search engine to find another just last week.

I was at a branch of the New York Public Library. They've been switching over from dumb terminals (which you can use from home - just telnet to nyplgate.nypl.org and login as "leo") to a Windows-based GUI, hybridized with a Netscape browser. However, to prevent the average user from surfing the Web on machines obstensibly set up for searching the library catalog, URLs cannot be entered into the Location field and the Open Page dialog is disabled.

As I was on the road during my lunch hour, and needed to check an address for my next stop, I spent about 5 minutes coming to the realization I have described above. Fortunately, the NYPL GUI helpfully links you to "approved" or "recommended" web resources, such as other libraries and literary sites. It took me about another minute to find an "approved" site that got me to Yahoo. From there, I went to AltaVista. From there, I could have gone anywhere -- with or without the ability to explicitly enter the URL.

WRT to the library, this whole incident demonstrates the idiocy of the library's effort to disable normal browser usage. The web is too interconnected to give a user a tiny subsection, short of not actually connecting to the Internet and using cached/offline versions of the "accepted" pages.

But, much more importantly, WRT to search engines confusing or removing their competitors from their search databases, it runs contrary to the spirit of the web and their entire raison d'etre. You want to find out about Yahoo on Lycos? No problem! Here's Yahoo itself, here's a parody site, here's a testimonial for Oracle. Search engines are expected to rate according to relevance, but not to editorialize. It's unprofessional, and confusing as all hell to the newbies.

If a search engine wants to distinguish itself on technical merits (like Google) or excellent design, it shouldn't act like a sleazy appliance salesman ("you don't wanna shop there, buddy...I gotta great deal for you right here....")

- Richie

Firstly the link in one of the other posts didn't seem to work so try this.
Secondly which SAS programming language don't you like ? Base SAS ,SCL, webAF or webEIS.
I agree that SCL syntax can be a bit annoying at times but the next version of SAS V8 to be released early next year has much better syntax more like c++ or java. WebAF is just java with a lot of extra classes added to it and a ide so you know what to expect there.

But the main reason for using a product like SAS is that you don't have to rewrite all the statistical and analytic back end procedures. However if you don't like the front end there is a standard server for Open OLAP server available from sas as well as several different web front ends.

For more info check
SAS OLAP
Cognos OLAP
Oracle OLAP

An aside SAS is releasing htmsql 2.0 for Linux as well as all its standard platfroms on tuesday. Does this mean that all of SAS is to be ported to linux ?

Grem

Check out this link at Oracle's web site

"Microsoft has had more than three months to respond to the challenge and we haven't heard a word from them," said Jeremy Burton, vice president of server marketing at Oracle. "This is because SQL Server 7.0 is years behind in data warehousing technology, they have yet to publish a single TPC-D result. Any customer considering SQL Server should have serious concerns about their failure to demonstrate performance in the critical Data Warehousing space".

I also seem to remember commercials from (1,2?) years ago touting Oracle's network computers as the "next big thing." Showing some kid in the inner city "surfing the 'net" & whatnot. Of course, they haven't exactly caught on.

Also, could someone enlighten me as to what exactly a network computer would require? I mean, I understand that they're essentially terminals with the actual programs residing on some remote server (now that's a new idea :), but wouldn't they require high bandwidth & high reliability? I mean, from the previous thred on cable vs. DSL, it seems like neither of those provides 100% reliable service. If your computer is totally dependent on some remote server, wouldn't you be SOL if your connection was down?

-mike kania

We are currently using Solaris as a server platform, with Apache or phttpd as a webserver and we are using Oracle and MySQL as databases. We are running PHP as scriping engine as CGI version and as Apache module in some instances.

You seem to come from a mostly Microsoft background, which is not where PHP is at home. PHP3 does not run as an IIS module, as far as I know, but only as a CGI version. This will make it perform much worse that for example CF or ASP on IIS, due to the abysmal performance of the NT platform and IIS as a CGI host - NT just doesn't fork. PHP4 will be running as an IIS module, but is in beta now and I would not build any production code on it - yet. As soon as PHP4 proves to be stable under load, it should outperform PHP3 by a factor of 5-10, though, plus the speed gain coming from being able to use it as a module on IIS.

On a Unix system (Linux, Solaris, doesn't matter) with Apache, PHP3 performs excellently as a module and can take any reasonable amount of load, provided you have enough RAM. We already know this from the Mindcraft benchmark - Apache must not swap and you must tune your MaxClients to match your RAM size to avoid performance degradation under high load. Many sites are parsing all pages, including their regular HTML, through PHP3 for convenience and the performance overhead is neglegible - if Apache can take it, Apache and mod_php can usually take it as well.

PHP excels in portability, support and in connectivity when benchmarked against CF. PHP will run on any old server platform and will talk to almost anything, and natively, where CF will most probably talk through an ODBC adapter. PHP includes some 10+ native database interfaces, including all major database vendors, and does LDAP, SNMP, SMTP, NNTP, IMAP4, POP3, some OODB and fulltext database protocols, can generate pictures on the fly, can generate PDF on the fly and so on. Writing extensions for PHP is trivial, if you can do reasonable PHP programming.

One point must not be left out of the equation when talking about PHP, and that is the online support. There are many large PHP mailing lists, including THE PHP3 mailing list, which are extremely friendly and efficient and usually generate correct and useful answers within 15 minutes. Also, the annotated online manual is a unique ressource for help, because it is learning and growing, incorporating user annotations. I have nowhere experienced anything that comes close to this kind in support, commerical or not.

My recommendation: PHP on IIS on Windows works, but will most likely not perform as exspected. It is nice for testing, but I won't go productive in this configuration. PHP on Apache on Windows works better, but will still not use PHP to it's fullest advantage. Also, you will make installation and maintentance unnecessarily difficult for you. PHP on Apache on any Unix will perform extremely satisfactorily, generate only minimal TCO, and is supported excellently. If you have at least minimal Unix knowhow inhouse, I suggest that you go for the full plunge in a test installation instead of an incremental migratory approach, because this way you will maximize the advantages of PHP and your server platform.

Re the migration from version 3 to version 4: PHP4 and PHP3 are drop-in compatible. There is no need to "port" from 3 to 4, because both languages are virtually identical. The differences are extremely minimal and well documented, also the development team is working on closing these final gaps between versions. Changes between version 3 and 4 are completly internal, switching from a fully interpreted system to a byte-code compiler/interpreter hybrid for speed reasons. Also, some language features have been added in an upward compatible and transparent way. We have tested the beta and found it to be living up to its promises in speed _and_ compatibility. Waiting for PHP4 won't pay: You can use PHP3 to learn just now and all this knowledge as well as your code will be valid and valueable on PHP4.

If you'll be using the CGI version of PHP3, please be sure that you

• set up a chroot() running environment for your CGI (phttpd does this by default, Apache does this with a modified suexec - ask me if you need it).
• compile a version of PHP with --enable-force-cgi-redirect or you'll be opening a great security hole.

If you have any further questions, please subscribe to the php3@lists.php.net mailing list or have a look at the PHP Knowledge base. These are great ressources.

In fact, Oracle claims it already has 50,000 downloads or Oracle on Linux and 800 paying customers for it. And they've got other products on Linux, too.

They've got a press release about it.

In case you don't feel like going thru registration hassles, just grab it from
ftp://ftp.oracle.com/pub/www/otn /linux/815ship.tgz. It is legal, ain't it?

The cognoscenti who are a little familiar with Oracle's web/ftp presences might, like myself, have just skipped going through Oracle's frequently-overloaded technet webserver and just gone straight to Oracle's FTP site and grabbed the stuff from there directly. Higher likelyhood of connection, can get ncftp to hammer if you can't connect first time, and also, it's anonymous!

• Oracle8 Standard 8.0.5.1
  
• Oracle8 Enterprise 8.0.5.1
  
• Oracle Application Server 3.0.2
  
• Patches to upgrade (preumably from the prelrelease version) of Standard to version 8.0.5.1
  

as you will see when you follow this link

The Oracle Million Dollar Challange - Challange Specifications

Oracle did not specify the a close date for the challange. this removes your first claim.

as for your second claim; Mr. Jarvis asserts what Microsoft did not run Q5. on the other hand Microsoft asserts that they did and HP asserts that they did. the burden of proof is on the prosocution. you've offered us hearsay and Microsoft and HP are offering us direct first party.

case not proven.

the prosecution looses.

Well, as of 4pm EST on Mar18, there're no signs of victory on Microsoft's website. Oracle, on the other hand, has a brand new challenge here. They claim $283QphD (whatever that means).