Re: Is this the way Oracle always does business?

From: David-Michael Lincke <dlincke_at_bandon.unisg.ch>
Date: 1996/06/10
Message-ID: <1996Jun10.224843.4390_at_sgcl1.unisg.ch>#1/1


Phil Glatz (pglat_at_quickquote.com) wrote:
: I recently had a strange experience with Oracle Corp., and wonder is
: this is to be expected.
:
: Here's the situation: we run an insurance industry web page and have
: outgrown dbm and really need a full relational database with transaction
: rollbacks, good backup utilities, and all the other bells and whistles.
: And since many of the banks we do business with recommend Oracle, it
: sounded like a good choice.
:
: Although we need a good, secure SQL product, our requirements are
: pretty basic (one location, small data tables). So spending tens of
: thousands of dollars for the Enterprise Edition seemed like overkill.
: So a friendly salesperson suggested all we needed was the "Oracle 7
: Workgroup Server", available at a fraction of the cost. Seemed strange
: to me something so good was so cheap, but the explanation was that they
: were trying to get market share away form Microsoft, even it it meant
: taking a loss. Ok.
:
: Things started getting murkier - we run the Netscape Secure Commerce
: Server on Sparc/Solaris, and the Workgroup server for Solaris isn't
: ready yet. So we were told we could get an NT version, and a free
: upgrade to the Solaris version when it came out. So we got an NT box,
: hooked it up to our TCP/IP LAN, and were all set to go (so we thought),
: the theory being the Perl CGI code on the Sparc would be able to talk to
: the Oracle server on the Sparc.
:
: Guess what? Turns out the boxes don't talk to each other. After nearly
: five hours on the phone to Oracle today, I've heard everything from
: "should run just fine with what ya got" to "no, that's impossible" to
: "it can be done, but it is very difficult and you'll need a bunch of
: other software that isn't cheap". And this is advice from the
: "experts", the same ones who told me it would work when I bought it,
: even though I had questions like "don't we need some sort of client
: software running on the Sparc?".
:
: So what's the deal? If I can't get the right answers from Oracle, then
: where? I'm about to return everything and go to another vendor, but the
: folks I spke with at Sybase and Informix seemed not all that anxious to
: help when I tried to purchase their products.
:
: The guys next door are running Netscape Server on a Sparc, and using
: Microsoft Lan Manager on NT as a database server, via the MS ODBC
: connectivity layer. Seems to work ok for them. What would the downside
: of this approach be (besides the political implications, a lot of the
: bankers I talk to don't like Microsoft products)?
:
: I'm kind of dismayed by all this - I've been told by more than one
: person that Oracle makes a great product, but expect to spend large
: bucks up front, get nickle and dimed for maintenance, and be ready to
: hire expensive outside consultants to answer the questions Oracle can't
: (or won't). Makes doing business with Microsoft look a lot less
: unattractive.

What you need to get this running is Oracle client libraries for Solaris, i.e. OCI libraries and header files, SQL*Net 2 and SQL*Net 2 TCP/IP protocol adaptor. This will enable you to build oraperl or the Perl 5 DBI DBD::Oracle driver to talk to the Workgroup Server on NT.

For your limited needs it might be worth looking into other non-commercial products like mSQL, though. Then again that way might be politically difficult for you. Bankers are a tough breed to deal with...we got those problems every day :)

dave Received on Mon Jun 10 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST

Original text of this message