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Re: vendor using oracle 10g database for application, but wants to lock access to data (vendor lock-in)

From: Jim Kennedy <kennedy-downwithspammersfamily_at_attbi.net>
Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 20:58:35 -0700
Message-ID: <wOKdnTGqLJ8tV13fRVn-3w@comcast.com>

"pheonix1t" <pheonix1tAThoustonDOTrrDOTcom_at_com.com> wrote in message news:ky3we.436$Ox3.98_at_newssvr12.news.prodigy.com...
> what are ways to bypass vendor lock-in on oracle 10g?
> one site I work at has been a beta testing site for about 2 years for an
> EMR vendor (electronic medical records).
> Now, the application is almost finished and I asked about odbc or XML
> access to the database and we've been told that's a topic we'll have to
> discuss with sales!
> they're telling us if we want any interface to other systems, they can
> build it for us!
>
> Is there a polite but clear way to state that it's OUR DATA and we want
> full access to it by any method oracle supports?
>
> Has anyone else seen this? I feel like they've used the beta sites and
> now they want to take advantage of them by telling most doctors (who
> have no idea about rdbms issues, data access, etc) that for a price, the
> vendor can make an interface for them!
>
> Oskar
>
> ps. I was thinking of getting around them by resetting the system
> password to the database! It's on win2k server. I guess sqlplus from
> command line should work. I tried 'connect / as sysdba' and 'connect
> system as sysdba'. For system, i get prompted for a password, / gets
> privilage error or something like that. I don't know the password!
> HELP!!
>
> I guess I can put a request on metalink for lost system password, that
> must be pretty common for them (I guess).
>

I worked for an EMR company and they published the schema and tables, and relationals for about 95% of the database. The objective was to allow the customer to create their own reports on the data etc. The other 5% that was not publicly documented was data that didn't deal with the medical data. The data wasn't encrypted and the customer could create their own reports with an outside reporting tool. (We didn't build our own report writer, we used a commercially available reporting package - Crystal Reports in this case. If the customer wanted to use a different reporting package for their reporting they could; it was not integrated into the application.

That said if the customer wanted to directly update the tables (insert or update) that we did not allow. We licensed the Oracle database to the customer as a run time license. (so they were not allowed to change the schema or directly insert or update data.) If they wanted a lab or other interface then we charged them for developing that. (assuming it wasn't a standard one, that we had)

So I would say, if you are just Reading the information then you should be allowed to do that. Also the company should document the data schema. (Hopefully they haven't done stupid things like comma delimited values in a column to contain multiple values.) If you want to change the data or insert new data then there are a lot of implications for that.

What EMR company?

I used to work for a company called Medicalogic.(Logician) They went bankrupt and GE Medical bought the assets. I don't know if they changed the policy when they bought the assets of the company, but I don't think so. It was a good product; I suspect it is still a good product. GE wouldn't have bothered to buy them if they were going to radically change the product. Jim Received on Mon Jun 27 2005 - 22:58:35 CDT

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