Re: Where is Oracle’s Grid ?

From: Daniel Morgan <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu>
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 15:01:26 -0800
Message-ID: <1072479592.690344@yasure>

Niall Litchfield wrote:

> "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
>
> a) generally got one or more tools that allow you to submit sql directly.
> b) allow additions to schemas (but not 'modifications') so you can add
> indexes, mviews etc etc.
> c) 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.
>

I'm not arguing that companies have built lousy apps using the Oracle database as the back end. They have also done so using DB2, Informix, Sybase, and MySQL as the back-end.

That that good apps can be built on these databases and the fault, therefore is the vendors, not Oracle's.

-- 
Daniel Morgan
http://www.outreach.washington.edu/ext/certificates/oad/oad_crs.asp
http://www.outreach.washington.edu/ext/certificates/aoa/aoa_crs.asp
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace 'x' with a 'u' to reply)

Received on Fri Dec 26 2003 - 17:01:26 CST