Distributed Oracle - what does it take?

Hi. If any Oracle gurus have experience converting to a distributed database, I would appreciate your comments and suggestions.

Our system is HP-UX with Oracle 7.0.16.4.0, and another department has Oracle on a VAX/VMS system (belive this is also 7.0.16). The other department has a tool they want to implement which doesn't have aVAX/VMS version, so the idea is to link the two Oracle systems as a distributed database, install the tool on our HP-UX system and use it to hit their VAX/VMS database's tables.

1. Is this feasible? possible? advisiable?
2. How hard would it be to implement, assuming both Oracle's have the distributed option, to set this up? I'm assuming that they would have to convert their database to a distributed database and make our system a node, however all the tables would reside on their system - our node would just be a window on their database for the tool to work through.

Any advice is much appreciate, as I'm new to the idea of distributed databases in general.

-Tommy

p.s. The decision about the tool has already been made, i.e. we can't change to

     another tool that has a VAX/VMS version. Received on Thu Jan 26 1995 - 18:35:34 CET