Re: Foreign key in Oracle Sql

Hugo Kornelis wrote:

>>That might be of interest to them but give me one reason why Oracle
>>would want to facilitate that? Just one. I can't think of any.

No reason to care except perhaps SAP. And where else is SAP going to go? Sybase? Informix? SQL Server ... not for years and IBM is only a serious competitor in the space that their own operating systems.

Not that this might not be an issue in the future. But today ... not from where I sit and observe.

  Ensuring that these
> vendors, when pressured by their customers to move to other DB platforms,
> won't drop Oracle but rather add support for another platform (with the
> lower price point for SQL Server licenses and the easier setup and
> administration,

Old argument that no longer holds water. Oracle matches SQL Server $ for $ on licensing with a far richer feature set. The old days when Oracle was more expensive are no more. And sinc SQL Server won't scale, can't be clustered, has no partitioning, etc. it will be at least 2006 before a still unreleased version has even a remote chance of being taken seriously. And even if it is that will only be on Windows and a quick look around the real world shows little interest in Windows based financial systems.

  I can imagine that many small-to-medium-sized businesses
> are pressuring the ERP vendors to move to MS).

Perhaps in the U.S. a year or two ago but not on the rest of the planet and not any more. The pressure is to move to Linux.

  Or the extra sales these
> firms may make when they reassure their customers that they can easily
> upgrade to the mainframe version if their business continues to grow?

Only IBM has any interest in mainframes and they aren't getting rich on them any more.

> Anyway, you asked me to look at it from the standpoint of the major
> application vendors and I did - so you shouldn't complain that this might
> not be advantegeous to Oracle.
>
> Best, Hugo

Won't complain but I don't think your arguments indicate a weakness worthy of being plugged: Yet. Anything in our business is possible in the future.

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
University of Washington
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace 'x' with 'u' to respond)