Well, Oracle has always been freely available for non-production use.. They even mail out their entire range of software(DB, App server,dev tools etc) free of cost.
I once received 10g for linux, and the box had every latest release of Oracle software for Linux. They're quite developer-friendly; just as MS is. For production use however..
This is the reason I think the whole comparison is unfair - PHP should've been compared to ASP.NET or any one of the bazillion Web UI frameworks of Java(Spring,Struts, Tapestry,JSF whatever).
However, the real strength of these systems is not in themselves; they are built on a superb platform base which provides Threading, IO, Networking, Graphics, Db access, i18n,and all the things a programmer might ever require. PHP doesnt have anything remotely similar, as far as i can see.
Is there any evidence to suggest that "just program it yourself" on the client side would be any more efficient? It seems to me that sending a large chunk of SQL over the wire, parsing / validating it, compiling it, and executing it must be for any sane DB slower than a stored proc.
It doesnt necessarily have to be client-side code; it can be server-side modules written in C/C++. Even now, people prefer OCI over Oracle stored procedures for some specialized applications. Stored procedures are usually compiled to byte-code, which is then interpreted at runtime. This translates into mediocre performance for most compute-intensive apps.
However I agree with your basic premise; SPs are the way to go for more database manipulation code.
They are the leech of the industry, and with our patronage, future R&D is in grave trouble, because they give nothing back to the community.
Sorry, but this statement is total bullshit. Nothing back to the community ? Giving the customer a much better price-performance than everybody else means nothing?
I agree with most of your comment, Sun's boxes are usually better engineered. However, innovation does not always have to be in the technical domain; there's as much innovation happening in other fields, including marketing. Would you say Amazon.com has done nothing interesting because they did not invent any of their products? If Dell's products are so poor, why does Sun feel the need to compare themselves with Dell?
Frankly it looks like Windows XP with a new UI and alpha tranceparancy.
And I think that freaking rocks. Seriously.
There's zero learning curve, everything's where you expected, just a few differences here and there.
The difference is in the plumbing. Doesnt Windows XP look almost identical to Windows 95? Yet if you suggest both products have the same functionality, you are sadly misinformed.
Longhorn will be to XP what XP was to 95. An in-depth architectural redesign, with the same familiar user interface.
Some folks like to stick with what they know. I'm not ashamed that I still use Sawfish, when there are so many whizbang window managers/DEs/kitchen sinks around. The same is the case with the Windows UI. I've tried almost all themes, visual styles, stardock, etc. but I still stick with Windows classic.
And I think that's the biggest asset of Microsoft. When they ditch the familiar Windows UI, people will eventually start migrating to other platforms..
Somebody actually asks a relevant,on-topic question requesting a comparison of actual product features, and all you could do was blather about proprietary software?
News for you: Proprietary software gets reverse engineered all the time. Ever wondered how Google Desktop search so nicely indexes all the Outlook emails ? Not to mention every mail server nowadays support POP/IMAP. Including Exchange and Lotus notes.
And Outlook 2003 is the best damn email client available. Ever wondered why your "high-quality free software" email clients look so much like Outlook ?
Have you actually worked in a Corporate environment? Do you even understand why people need Calendaring and scheduling?
You've got some vague answers mentioning books on relational theory.
I would recommend you pick up Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties. This covers practical problems, a number of database implementations; the author also highlights where SQL shines, and where it doesnt.
The real benefit of this book is it makes you start thinking in Sets; this is extremely important if you want to get any reasonable performance out of your DBMS. Some problems which seemingly require procedural solutions can be tackled with SQL, for eg. hierarchies, trees etc.
Newer DBMS systems offer even more richer SQL constructs ; The analytics/ data mining extensions for Oracle really rock. I'm told SQLServer 2005 will have similar DW extensions. Taking the time to read product documentation will also help tremendously. Most enterprise DBMS vendors offer very good documentation.
If Microsoft turned around and released a perfect, bug free operating system that interfaced perfectly with all the competitions' offerings, there would be a 1000 comment shitstorm of complaint as the flock of rabid posters decried them for not releasing the source, or for charging for the software.
But the problem has been that Windows has never had a perfect release whereas Apple has had a wonderful track-record in most of their releases.
[insert long tirade about security here[
[insert monopolistic practices rant]
[insert disdain for windows 98]
[insert smug sense of superiority]
Well IMHO, thats completely wrong - they are only interested in peddling their content. Nothing more.
I wonder why people cant see this ; developing and supporting major applications like wordprocessors and browsers are a total money drain. And that field is a mature field- there is not much innovation to be done there.
The innovation will be in the value additions. If you have MS Office 2k3, try doing an Alt+Click. A neat little Research pane pops up, within which you can do web searches, encarta lookups etc. without opening a browser. Users love gizmos like this - they feel it is a real convenience for them.
I expect google to keep producing these little searchlets (you heard it here first, folks!). For eg, an ActiveX google search control for your MS office application. Voila, search from within Outlook, Excel,Word,Powerpoint the whole shebang! Add spellcheck to it, smart-tag lookups, search-as-you-type in a document etc etc.
This war is not to produce the greatest app, not to be cross-platform, not to beat MS, and definitely not about being a top software vendor.
It is for your eyeballs - the more you see their content, the more the money they'll make.
I wouldnt know what's Redundant about parent post. Atleast there hasnt been any mention so far about other parallel init systems. Is it because he complimented NT?
FWIW, I use Fefe's Minit, which is based on daemontools. And it was probably the first attempt at speeding up boot times in Linuxland. Good to see things like this going mainstream.
But you've just compared a complete storage system encompassing fonts, vector graphics, images, form fields and the whole kitchensink - with an image compression app.
If you think PDF is just for document creation, you are sadly mistaken. It grew up beyond that a long time ago.
Microsoft actually is addressing this on 2 fronts - Infopath to handle forms - Metro to be the default output format.
I really didnt think they would be brave/(stupid?) enough to take on PDF. As another poster mentioned, they're going to face performance issues with XML processing. However, what else are those processor cycles going to be used for?
Slashdot Mirror
And probably bankrupt atleast a million small-medium web hosts ;)
Well, Oracle has always been freely available for non-production use.. They even mail out their entire range of software(DB, App server,dev tools etc) free of cost.
I once received 10g for linux, and the box had every latest release of Oracle software for Linux. They're quite developer-friendly; just as MS is. For production use however..
Think embedded DB.. This is just for applications which need a local cache. Dunno how much real muscle this has inherited though..
MS offered a SQL Server express too. This is probably just a response.
This is the reason I think the whole comparison is unfair - PHP should've been compared to ASP.NET or any one of the bazillion Web UI frameworks of Java(Spring,Struts, Tapestry,JSF whatever).
However, the real strength of these systems is not in themselves; they are built on a superb platform base which provides Threading, IO, Networking, Graphics, Db access, i18n,and all the things a programmer might ever require. PHP doesnt have anything remotely similar, as far as i can see.
Well, a full-featured Office suite that works RIGHT NOW, maybe?
You rich kids and your fancy printing machines!
Back in the day, all we had was a pencil, and it came in only one colour.
Imagine hours of cursive writing, you young farging bastages..
It doesnt necessarily have to be client-side code; it can be server-side modules written in C/C++. Even now, people prefer OCI over Oracle stored procedures for some specialized applications. Stored procedures are usually compiled to byte-code, which is then interpreted at runtime. This translates into mediocre performance for most compute-intensive apps.
However I agree with your basic premise; SPs are the way to go for more database manipulation code.
But when Google does it, its kosher? WTF?
Everybody is in the bundling game, and guess what; some people like the bundled stuff. If you dont like it, dont use it.
Sorry, but this statement is total bullshit. Nothing back to the community ? Giving the customer a much better price-performance than everybody else means nothing?
I agree with most of your comment, Sun's boxes are usually better engineered. However, innovation does not always have to be in the technical domain; there's as much innovation happening in other fields, including marketing. Would you say Amazon.com has done nothing interesting because they did not invent any of their products? If Dell's products are so poor, why does Sun feel the need to compare themselves with Dell?
Well it might be funny now, but they may have the last laugh. An archival scheme is vital for sustained performance.
Well, that gives you out... You're no mainframe programmer, bud.
And mainframe guys were copying 40MB files around long before you were born ;)
I agree. Sometimes exaggeration helps :)
And I think that freaking rocks. Seriously. There's zero learning curve, everything's where you expected, just a few differences here and there.
The difference is in the plumbing. Doesnt Windows XP look almost identical to Windows 95? Yet if you suggest both products have the same functionality, you are sadly misinformed.
Longhorn will be to XP what XP was to 95. An in-depth architectural redesign, with the same familiar user interface.
Some folks like to stick with what they know. I'm not ashamed that I still use Sawfish, when there are so many whizbang window managers/DEs/kitchen sinks around. The same is the case with the Windows UI. I've tried almost all themes, visual styles, stardock, etc. but I still stick with Windows classic.
And I think that's the biggest asset of Microsoft. When they ditch the familiar Windows UI, people will eventually start migrating to other platforms..
That may be, I'm afraid you are still in 1994. Its June 2005, please adjust your clock.
Yep.. But insignificant for a $10M project isnt it ;)
If you have a complex enough set of rules, it might be better to pony up the licensing costs for Ilog. It's native .NET code, and very capable.
Oh FSCK OFF. Seriously.
Somebody actually asks a relevant,on-topic question requesting a comparison of actual product features, and all you could do was blather about proprietary software?
News for you: Proprietary software gets reverse engineered all the time. Ever wondered how Google Desktop search so nicely indexes all the Outlook emails ? Not to mention every mail server nowadays support POP/IMAP. Including Exchange and Lotus notes.
And Outlook 2003 is the best damn email client available. Ever wondered why your "high-quality free software" email clients look so much like Outlook ?
Have you actually worked in a Corporate environment? Do you even understand why people need Calendaring and scheduling?
If not, SHUT THE FSCK UP.
I would recommend you pick up Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties. This covers practical problems, a number of database implementations; the author also highlights where SQL shines, and where it doesnt.
The real benefit of this book is it makes you start thinking in Sets; this is extremely important if you want to get any reasonable performance out of your DBMS. Some problems which seemingly require procedural solutions can be tackled with SQL, for eg. hierarchies, trees etc.
Newer DBMS systems offer even more richer SQL constructs ; The analytics/ data mining extensions for Oracle really rock. I'm told SQLServer 2005 will have similar DW extensions. Taking the time to read product documentation will also help tremendously. Most enterprise DBMS vendors offer very good documentation.
But the problem has been that Windows has never had a perfect release whereas Apple has had a wonderful track-record in most of their releases. [insert long tirade about security here[ [insert monopolistic practices rant] [insert disdain for windows 98] [insert smug sense of superiority]
SAVE IT.
Well IMHO, thats completely wrong - they are only interested in peddling their content. Nothing more.
I wonder why people cant see this ; developing and supporting major applications like wordprocessors and browsers are a total money drain. And that field is a mature field- there is not much innovation to be done there.
The innovation will be in the value additions. If you have MS Office 2k3, try doing an Alt+Click. A neat little Research pane pops up, within which you can do web searches, encarta lookups etc. without opening a browser. Users love gizmos like this - they feel it is a real convenience for them.
I expect google to keep producing these little searchlets (you heard it here first, folks!). For eg, an ActiveX google search control for your MS office application. Voila, search from within Outlook, Excel,Word,Powerpoint the whole shebang! Add spellcheck to it, smart-tag lookups, search-as-you-type in a document etc etc.
This war is not to produce the greatest app, not to be cross-platform, not to beat MS, and definitely not about being a top software vendor.
It is for your eyeballs - the more you see their content, the more the money they'll make.
FWIW, I use Fefe's Minit, which is based on daemontools. And it was probably the first attempt at speeding up boot times in Linuxland. Good to see things like this going mainstream.
Also checkout Raster's site.
Can you imagine a graphics system that runs on PDAs, your computer from 1999, and your shiny new boxes? E17 is just f'ing brilliant.
Well, we've always been able to print to postscript, in most operating systems; this is just an evolution.
Read that, you might learn a thing or two.