Re: Migration from Informix to Oracle 7.3.3

Nathan,

You hit upon two of the big differences in concept between Oracle and Informix.

Informix uses the concept of multiple databases, Oracle uses the concept of multiple owners to achieve the same effect. At first this is scary since realizing security may not be readily apparent. In the Oracle world create each Informix database as a set of tables belonging to an owner. Control security by only granting access, and only the type of access desired, to either named users or roles.

If a user logs onto Oracle from a local terminal session they can be forced to provide an Oracle ID and an Oracle password which Oracle does check. In this case they already had to login to the system and survive the system logon validation -- so they should be valid users :-).

If a user logs onto an application from a client then the validation is either explicit via a login to SQL*Net or implicit by logging into an application server which then logs into Oracle.

SQL*Net is very persnickety. You can only logon if you can provide the appropriate Oracle ID and password for the instance you are logging into.

Applications with implicit logon must be evaluated on an individual basis.

In any event you can implement as much security as you feel necessary.

Hope this is of value

Jerry

Nathan Neulinger wrote:
>
> We are currently running Informix-5, with a setup as follows:
>
> Single DB server running version 5 of informix.
> Multiple (60+) databases served
> Lots of Infomaker clients using password authentication
> Several unix client workstations using .rhosts/hosts.equiv
> authentication.
>
> From the looks of things after installing 7.3.3, (well, starting to
> install it anyway.) It seems that oracle can only serve a single database
> per instance. This means we would have to run 60+ instances of oracle on
> the DB server, does it not? Many of the databases have identical tables
> and are archive versions of the main database. I.e. the Fall Semester
> 1996 student database.
>
> Oracle does not seem to support .rhosts/hosts.equiv authentication, so it
> looks like we'll have to move to embedding the passwords in the perl
> scripts that connect to the database server (or in a local file or similar).
>
> Does anyone have any pointers or tips for going about this migration
> process. At the moment, I am still struggling with just getting Oracle up
> and running to where I can connect to it remotely.
>
> -- Nathan
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Nathan Neulinger EMail: nneul_at_umr.edu
> University of Missouri - Rolla Phone: (573) 341-4841
> Computing Services Fax: (573) 341-4216
Received on Tue Jan 06 1998 - 00:00:00 CST