Oracle's Infrastructure Now Fully Linux-ized

mbadolato writes "An article over at InformationWeek reports Oracle is aggressively adopting Linux both internally and for its products, despite SCO Group's threats earlier this week that it may sue those who don't pay licensing fees to the company. Chuck Rozwat, an Oracle executive VP, says the company has moved its IT infrastructure to Linux, a year after CEO Larry Ellis issued the mandate. In the coming year, Oracle will move its base development platform to Linux, including putting the open-source operating system on the workstations of 8,000 developers"

Comments

Ellis?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when did Larry Ellison drop the last two letters of his last name? Come on, editors...

Re:8000 developers?

[Permission Denied]

Could this have something to do with readline being GPL'd, and Oracle not wanting to release sqlplus under it?

Most likely.

The readline folks are real fanatics. They've continually denied requests to put readline under LGPL - they want to make sure the only things that use readline are GPLed. That is, they're doing this on purpose.

Because of this debacle, the *BSD camp was forced to come up with the editline library for all their stuff. And then you have stuff like Sun's dbx that has its own readline replacement. And Oracle's SQL client, and Sybase's isql, and sqsh, ....

Now, it's not quite trivial to write a readline replacement because you have to deal with all sorts of crufty, non-portable *nix terminal arcana, but it's also not difficult. The problem is that all readline replacements are incompatible with each other. You can customize readline applications through .inputrc - this is really cool because you can make one binding and it works in bash, gdb, your (GPLed) console mp3 player, etc. However, these bindings won't carry over to FreeBSD's cdcontrol program or Sun's dbx.

The GPL also means that I can't use readline for some program I write for a client because these programs are usually internal company things that the company owns and can license however they want - they won't pay me if I stipulate that the code I wrote (which belongs to them) must be licensed under GPL for such a trivial reason. Since my clients won't be too happy paying me to write stupid terminal IO routines, I'm forced to either use plain old fgets or use editline, which (IMHO) is not as nice as readline.

The fanaticism is costing the *nix community some useful functionality, which is kind of sad.

Re:MySQL/Oracle = Apple/Orange

[kcbrown]

The only way to edit a column definition is to delete it and readd it with the correct properties, which means taking the DB offline, copying the whole table to a temporary table, deleting the offending column, readding the column, and then moving all of the data back into the old table from the temporary one, and now since your columns are in a different order, you have to play fun games to get that to work right.. then you can delete the temporary table, and put the DB back online, PURE TORTURE.

You, sir, are full of shit. Witness (the output isn't exactly what you'd see because of the crappy lameness filter and the limited Slashdot HTML options):

kevin> \d
No relations found.
kevin> create table foo (x integer, y varchar(20), z float);
CREATE TABLE
kevin> insert into foo (x, y, z) values (2, 'hello', 20.5);
INSERT 16997 1
kevin> select * from foo;
x y z
2 hello 20.5
(1 row)

kevin> begin;
BEGIN
kevin> alter table foo add column z2 integer;
ALTER TABLE
kevin> update foo set z2 = z;
UPDATE 1
kevin> alter table foo drop column z;
ALTER TABLE
kevin> alter table foo rename column z2 to z;
ALTER TABLE
kevin> select * from foo;
x y z
2 hello 20
(1 row)

kevin> \d foo
Table "public.foo"
Column Type Modifiers
x integer
y character varying(20)
z integer

kevin> rollback;
ROLLBACK
kevin> \d foo
Table "public.foo"
Column Type Modifiers
x integer
y character varying(20)
z double precision

So: not only can you do the operation without taking the database down, you can do it while within a transaction, and even rollback the entire change if you screw up!

This is under PostgreSQL 7.3.3.

Try that with your vaunted MySQL.