Re: Where is Oracle’s Grid ?

"Daniel Morgan" <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu> wrote in message news:1071847804.695870_at_yasure...
> >>I'm with you on many of the 3rd party suppliers. But why, exactly, is
> >>their refusal to follow advice given numerous times by Tom Kyte,
> >>Jonathan Lewis, Richard Foote, etc., etc. etc. Oracle's rsponsibility.
> >
> > They CANNOT follow the advice! That IS the whole point!
> > They do NOT have the source code to play with, they CANNOT
> > change a single line of any production setup without incurring
> > the "lost warranty" rubbish, they don't get the slightest
> > support from Oracle if they dare go against the 3rd party maker.
>
> I'd buy your argument if it was impossible for anyone to build a
> third-party application using the Oracle database but it isn't. And I
> know for a fact there are a huge number of extremely successful projects
> built with the same starting tools used by Siebel, SAP, and PeopleSoft.
>
> Just to name one look at Amazon.com. They have built one of the world's
> top database implementations using the very same CDs supplied by Oracle.
> They too didn't have the source code to tweak. So if they could do it
> correctly ... and so have many others ... why is it Oracle's fault that
> the big three app vendors wouldn't know referential integrity if it
> climbed out from under their bed every morning?

Um, I think that you are arguing at cross purposes. The point isn't that people don't have access to Oracle source, but that people don't have access to the application source. If Amazon bought an off the shelf web site package and used it to build Amazon.com (and maybe they did but that wasn't my understanding) then the comparison is valid, otherwise it is irrelevant. If they did what package is it does anyone know?

3rd party apps generally are designed to run across multiple customers with different data volumes, business models, trading volumes, levels of experience and software platforms. In my view it is really not surprising that they are least common denominator stuff, and to a lesser extent that code that belongs in the db goes into the application. Nearly all software that runs on Oracle these days is produced by commercial software developers and not in-house, for most of these people the challenge is to support Oracle,MSSQL and DB2.

That said, and maybe I have just been lucky, the vendors we have have

1. generally got one or more tools that allow you to submit sql directly.
2. allow additions to schemas (but not 'modifications') so you can add indexes, mviews etc etc.
3. sensible support staff who will listen to cases/demonstrations of problems and agree 'workarounds' with you.

Too often the picture is of a vendor who won't allow *anything* to be changed at all, even if the payroll takes 8 days to run for 8 people. This picture is I think a little misleading.

-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
Audit Commission UK