Re: Oracle Personal Server 7 vs Access

In article <5gm7vo$csm$4_at_ocoee.iac.net>, Mark Wagoner <mwagoner_at_iac.net> wrote:
>Personal Oracle and Access are not really in the same catagory. Personal
>Oracle is a true database engine where Access is a glorified flat-file
>database you access through DLLs.
>
>If you have a simple app or your users are not real computer literate,
>Acces is probably the better fit. If you need any horsepower, need to
>perform complex SQL expressions or have an Oralce installation already (and
>may need to extract data from one to the other), then Personal Oracle will
>work better.

I don't really disagree with Mark here, but I think I would put things a little differently. The "personal" Oracle series, from its inception, was never intended to be a product for end-users. As far back as Oracle version 4, the first version to appear in MS-DOS, the primary purpose for it was to give developers who would normally be working in the expensive multi-user environment of VAX and Unix machines a version of the database that they could use for prototyping in the much less expensive arena of the PC.

Oracle continues to attempt to find a way to address the PC market-- Blaze was a disaster but "Oracle Lite" has garnered some respectful attention from the trade press. In the meantime, Personal Oracle7 (the full version) remains a fine product for introducing developers to the power of the industrial-strength product with full support for triggers, functions, procedures, packages, constraints, all of the tuning tools, etc. As Oracle likes to point out (and it is pretty much true), an application designed for this environment can be scaled all the way to the enterprise with relatively little fuss.

Access is an attractive product in the PC community because it is a superb combination of products which provide an "all in one box" solution to problems which are confined either to a single desktop or a small workgroup. The developers gets a database which is quite fast and reliable and comes complete with a decent application design tool and reporting environment. The applications you develop will be useful only in a 100% Microsoft environment and will not be easily scalable, but for many projects that is an acceptable trade-off for the much reduced cost.

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Jack F. Love
Opinions expressed are mine alone, unless you happen to agree