State of Oracle, A/UX and PowerMacs and PowerOpen

I just got some information faxed to me from my Oracle rep which may be of interest to many of you either running or contemplating running Oracle servers on A/UX, PowerMacs, or PowerOpen-based PowerMacs.

In summary, Oracle plans to port all major software to PowerPC including the Oracle7 server, the standalone database product, Proc*C, SQL*Plus, SQL*Net and other related utilities. Right now, Oracle plans these ports to be on MacOS running on PowerMacs, not PowerOpen or NetWare, although they are seriously studying both possibilities for future availability (in my opinion, the PowerOpen port would be trivial since it should be nearly identical to the AIX 4.1 version upcoming).

In addition, since the current version of Oracle Server V6.036 for standard Macintosh (not A/UX) won't run properly under emulation either due to the incompatibility of the SQL*Net tools with Apple's Shared Library Manager, bug fixes for SQL*Net will come in the December time frame. PowerMac compatible versions of Oracle Glue should be available in 60 days, with SQL*Plus not making it until February.

But the news does not bode well for Oracle and A/UX. Oracle is dropping further development of the Oracle7 Server for A/UX product after version 7.016 is released, and will cease to offer it for sale when the Oracle Stand-alone for PowerMac version comes out round about February. This version is not a full blown Oracle7 Server version though; you will have to wait until August 1995 for that version to appear. Gee, by that time, Oracle8 should be close to release! Oracle is also promising PMac ports of the CDE2 and Office Client products, but no hard dates for this (they say Q1 1995).

For users who want to wait for the Oracle Server for PowerMac in August 1995, the prospects of a swift powerful product appear to be good. Apple should hopefully be releasing Copland (System 7.X? System 8?) which should make any native app, especially one that's disk intensive really fly, since most if not all the ROM routines will be native by that time. Also, Copland should get some memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking that would be required for a high performance server product.

For those with the older Oracle products on older platforms, we will either have to stick with what we have or upgrade. The A/UX community is alreading facing this challenge now. Oracle will of course continue to support all older products through standard support contract arrangements.

So if you want to see a version of Oracle for PowerOpen or Novell/PowerMac, I suggest you send Oracle a message that it would be in their best interests to pursue such a product.

--
--Rick Ewing

  Vanderbilt University
  ewing_at_vhp.vanderbilt.edu Received on Tue Oct 04 1994 - 21:05:15 CET