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Re: Free Oracle Server for intranet?

From: Mladen Gogala <gogala_at_sbcglobal.net>
Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2006 04:29:18 GMT
Message-Id: <pan.2006.02.15.04.29.17.482060@sbcglobal.net>


On Mon, 13 Feb 2006 17:57:40 -0800, shumaker wrote:

> Our department is loosing access to MS Server 2000.

Wrong wording. The right wording would be: "our department did a great job and we are rewarded by not having to contend with MS Server 2000 any more. The damagement will finally buy us a real database."

>I am looking into
> different possibilities of replacements, Oracle being one. I know
> Oracle is available for free, but I'm not clear what the limitations of
> it are, and that's what I need clarified for me please.

The Oracle RDBMS that is available for free is Express Oracle. Express Oracle is a serious toy, but a toy nevertheless. It cannot exceed 4GB in size, which is far too small for any serious application. Nothing else is free for a commercial environment. In addition to that, Oracle has something called "Oracle Standard Edition One", which doesn't include some advanced features (no partitioning, RAC, AQ) and which costs few hundred dollars, typically below $1000. You can also buy standard edition, license fee is $4500/CPU. Enterprise edition (EE) costs $10000/CPU. Your description sounds like it can be satisfied by the standard edition one. For more information, you will have to contact Oracle sales. I don't work for Oracle, I have never worked for Oracle and the information I gave you provides a ballpark and cannot be considered accurate. Make sure that you tell your Oracle salesman how much do you intend to spend so that he doesn't try to convince you that 4 HP SuperDome computers in a RAC configuration with EMC Symmetrix as the shared disk farm are the only solution for you. Software sales people are slightly less trustworthy then used car sales people, lawyers or politicians. Any software sales people from this group are excluded, of course.

>
> It would reside in an intranet environment on a single processor
> machine with about 2-10 people accessing it at a given time. We would
> also need some sort of replacement for our DTS packages. I'm not sure
> of what kind of equivalent feature is available on Oracle. The DTS
> packages basically import CSV files and run several queries in a row
> before and after the CSV import, and perform some scripted
> transformations when importing the data.

CSV files are not really exotic, to say the least. There is approximately a gazillion of tools that can be used to load them: external tables, SQL*Loader, Perl, PHP, the tool formerly known as HTMLDB (now Oracle*Prince), visual basic, .NOT and many, many more. You can even use PL/I and CICS combination to load CSV tables into Oracle RDBMS, although I admit that it would be a little unusual to buy that just for loading CSV files. If any database is well supported by tools, it's Oracle RDBMS. You don't even have to give up DTS if it works with ODBC or ADO.

-- 
http://www.mgogala.com
Received on Tue Feb 14 2006 - 22:29:18 CST

Original text of this message

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