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Re: Oracle comparison

From: Generic Poster <nospam_at_nospam.com>
Date: 19 Jun 2002 04:11:10 GMT
Message-ID: <3D100375.8E900F50@nospam.com>


Galen Boyer wrote:
>
> On 18 Jun 2002, nospam_at_nospam.com wrote:
> > Daniel Morgan wrote:
> >>
> >> Generic Poster wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > Well.....it was more the case that we were avoiding the commercial SW
> > option, or attempting to avoid it. That is why we recommended
> > PostgreSQL. But we were curious about what the advantages of using
> > the commercial stuff were, and wanted to broaden our knowledge of this
> > area. The problem would have been that I do not have many employees
> > who know much about the commercial db's. I have a few guys who have
> > worked with MS SQL, and, in answer to your question, I do have one
> > employee who says he has experience working on Oracle. :) So, that
> > was why Oracle was in the game. If the client would have decided on
> > Oracle, I would have had that worker build it. No, *I* don't know
> > Oracle very well but I believe my worker knows it pretty
> > well....anway, he lists it on his CV, and he has Oracle installed on
> > his development box at home. :)
>
> Whee! He has been Oracle certified as well? Yeah. Sign him up. He
> must be an expert! He installed it at home.

Hehe. No, he has also done some Oracle programming but perhaps not a lot....I will have to check it out.....
>
> If this were the case then I would be a J2EE expert.
>
> > You are correct, if we had no Oracle experience, we may have had to
> > blow off the job if the client insisted on a solution. Thx for your
> > comments, though. Some of my workers here tell me, "All these SQL
> > db's are pretty much the same. If you know SQL, you can work with any
> > of them."
>
> This is true to some extent. You can code SQL that will run against
> just about any SQL database.

Interesting....

  But, this doesn't mean you have the
> expertise to build an enterprise solution with Oracle as the backbone,
> by any stretch of the imagination.

Well, we have enough sense to stay out of the enterprise market for now. :) This was just a small data warehouse on the Web.
>
> > Looks like this is not true.
>
> Correct.
>
> > How can you, in good
> >> conscience, think you could possibly create a good product in Oracle?
> >
> > We weren't really considering it. We recommended PostgreSQL. We are
> > *curious* about learning more about Oracle. That said, I do have a
> > programmer who claims he can do Oracle programming. :) His experience
> > is Oracle 8i. And he does have an Oracle dev box at home. :)
>
> Come on. Curious? Your company is curious about Oracle?

What are you talking about? We were curious about its advantages, if any, and if there were some, then we may look into doing more research on the product, and then even hiring Oracle pros to do some work for us, if clients need it and we feel we can bid on jobs.

Boy, you guys really try to discourage people from using your product......
>
> > Do
> >> you understand multiversioning? Do you understand Oracle's
> >> transaction and locking models?
> >
> > You have to ask my programmer. These are the things that I would like
> > to learn about myself. I basically am just a capitalist who does
> > nothing more than funds and runs this company here; my IT knowledge is
> > somewhat limited (not a programmer). My employees are the ones who
> > know about this stuff. That said, considering it is my company, I do
> > have to know a bit about that stuff.
>
> Here is a _fundamental_ difference between Oracle and, I believe, all
> the other DBMS vendors.
>
> Transaction1 starts at time1 updating RowA.
>
> A user asks for RowA before transation1 is committed. That user gets
> the data of RowA before time1. Their query doesn't wait for the
> transaction to complete, or fail or ... They get the previous version
> of RowA. No dirty reads, no concurrency issues, ... Just show me the
> committed data, whenever I ask for it.

Got it. This is easy to follow.

  My analogy is sort of like
> source control systems. Whatever is in the source control should always
> be able to be viewed. But, if the other database vendors architected
> source control systems, then, when someone checked out a file, no one
> else could see it until they checked it back in. Therefore, to build
> the latest version of the code, _all_ developers would have to checkin
> their code.

Ok, now you are talking programming projects.....:)

With Oracle, anybody at anytime can build the latest
> version of the code no matter how many files are currently checked
> out... The other database vendors would actually go so far as to let
> you look at the hard-drive of the developer who has the file checked out
> so you can at least move on (dirty reads).

Or worthless reads. Ok.
>
> If you think about the extra management layers needed to manage all
> those developers checking in code for somebody's latest build, it is
> similar to the extra code you'll have lying around dealing with the fact
> that a particular row is locked for update and therefore can't be read.

Ok, got that concept down (sort of). Thx.
> >
> > You really don't know what kind of a company I run here. We blow off
> > work all the time because we either don't have the skills, or don't
> > have the skills at moment, or the present crop of employees has poor
> > skills in that area, or whatever......I don't like to do crappy work,
> > unlike so many of my competitors.
>
> This is the best statement I've heard you make.

I'm not going to take a job just to make some $. If we cannot do (or try to do) a darn good job of it at the time, we turn the work (and the money) down. Someone else can have the $. In my field (web design, generally) I am just stunned at the amount of mediocre and crappy work out there. I won't be a part of it. I don't care how much $ I can make. I also turn down a lot of prospective employees. Hell of a lot of mediocre web designers out there. Received on Tue Jun 18 2002 - 23:11:10 CDT

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