Re: Free Oracle Server for intranet?

Thanks everyone for your replies. Very helpful!

I think I may even be able to continue to use my existing DTS packages if I modify the connections to point to the oracle server.

Since I have found that my Access Data Projects don't cooperate very well with SQL 2005, then Oracle is looking even more attractive. I'd have to use some sort of mediating drivers in either case anyways.

The 4gb limit shouldn't be a problem for our databases, and it is about the same as the limit that SQL 2005 Express has.

I'll take a more serious look at Oracle now that I know that there is a viable cost free solution.

> 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."

LOL. Unfortunetly, the management is likely not going to buy us a database. Hence the reason why I'm researching what is available for free. I'll probably even have to have people from seperate shifts share a computer so that I can claim a desktop system as a server.

We were actually very satisfied with it, and could develop solutions rapidly. However, I do regret developing so much that is now tied to it now that I'm faced with weening things off of it and getting it working with Oracle or MS SQL 2005 Express.

I could probably put together a quote for server hardware+software and tell them there is no alternative, and when they say, well we'll have to do without it, then I can watch them try to go back to using Excel for their tasks, and they will soon miss the time that they could do a day's worth of work in a couple of hours. I'd probably be shooting myself in the foot though, as I'd be writing Excel Macros then... and that just isn't that fun. :)

BTW, I don't work at FSU as I think some may have thought, that's just where I am finishing my degree remotely. I work for SAIC.

Thanks again. Take care.

Mladen Gogala wrote:
> 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 Wed Feb 15 2006 - 00:24:25 CST