there is a difference between wrapping the public interface to a file format
in a nice GUI and reverse engineering the file format. the latter while
educational is likely to break all sorts of IP if used as the basis for a
commercial product.
--
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
Audit Commission UK
"Ryan Gaffuri" <rkg100_at_erols.com> wrote in message
news:6757365f.0205091253.5167016a_at_posting.google.com...
> I have seen other freebie oracle utility. I remember one free Unix DBA
> tool that monitored your database for you. It looked pretty nice.
>
> I cant see how this would be illegal. Powerbuilder runs on Oracle, so
> does toad, and SQL Navigator, DBA Studio and lots of others. What
> about people who build there GUIs in Visual Studio?
>
> "Christopher L O'Sullivan" <itoys_at_tpg.com.au> wrote in message
news:<3cda591d_at_dnews.tpgi.com.au>...
> > I keep seeing requests on how to extract and re-load data into Oracle.
Back
> > in 1992, I wrote an UNLOAD utility [ who hasn't? ] to unload queries to
> > re-load using SQL*Loader. It supported various formats [fixed, CSV etc].
I
> > found LONGs to be a problem. SQL*Loader couldn't handle the new lines
[even
> > quoted]. I could not find a work around with loader. Then I thought
about
> > using good old Oracle IMP(ort). The format of the Oracle export file was
> > pretty straight forward [well at least for TABLE mode exports using
Oracle
> > 7.2 (way back in 1995 or thereabouts)] so I switched to generating
> > EXPORT/IMPORT compatible files. Real handy for schema upgrades and
making
> > test databases as subset of production [enough hype].
> >
> > I was wanting to release this UNLOAD utility as a freebie [yes I admit,
as a
> > little teaser to suck, I mean get people interested in a tool that I'm
> > developing]. The question is, IS IT LEGAL TO CREATE ORACLE COMPATIBLE
EXPORT
> > FILES? Does anyone know?
> >
> > Is this another case of UNISYS and the GIF [LZW] controversy? Can anyone
> > offer any [useful] suggestions?
Received on Fri May 10 2002 - 13:50:40 CDT
