Re: Are Universities using Oracle?

In article <mkeable.6.00099080_at_cti.ulaval.ca>, mkeable_at_cti.ulaval.ca (Michel Keable) wrote:

> We have been using Oracle for about 18 months for pilot projects to evaluate
> if it should become our major RDBMS. Technically we found no major problem
> but before the orientation becomes an official one, the University
> administration wants to know which universities are actually using Oracle
> RDBMS other than for teaching or research.
>
> As the vendor's list are generally not worth a look because they contain every
> organisation buying a licence even if it is just for evaluation, I would
> appreciate to receive a short description of the use of Oracle for
> administrative purpose made by universities in the world. By description, I
> mean "Human ressources", "Payroll",...
>
> If you can, could you also indicate the approximate number of users, the size
> of the machine used, the size of the database and finally the type of access
> i.e. terminal or client-server.

At the University of Michigan, Oracle usage is growing quite a bit. I am a part of UM's Campus Computing Site's Technical Support Group. We have (these numbers are approximations): 35 sites ranging in size from incredible small (only a few machines) to quite large (300+). We use Oracle to keep a full inventory of all hardware, all deployed software, employee hours, all pertinent network info (such as ethernet and IP addresses for BOOTP generation, DNS info, etc.), problem reporting and tracking (including sending mail and alphanumeric pages), site maps, site hours, statistics on machine usage (total "on" time, who is using the machine, users affiliation, etc.) as well as software usage (when app ran, ran for how long, who ran it, on which machine they ran it is, etc.) as well as station availability (for example, 10 machines busy and 14 free at Site X) and a variety of other operations.

The server is a Sun 4-670/MP is used with 2 CPUs and 4 Gigabytes of disk.

Intermediate software (written in C, uses OCI) runs out of cron on the Sun to perform periodic background Oracle operations such as generating BOOTP and DNS files as needed, exporting info for gopher, etc.

Client software runs on a Mac, uses Kerberos authentication (AuthMan, UM's krb v4 implementation), and provides (if I may say so) a "sweet interface" (tm) to performing queries to view as well as modify data.

All students (40,000+) can use the client software (called inSite) in "guest" mode to view public information. Employees such as the site monitors (50?), site technicians (5?), and support staff (20?) have more operations permitted to them.  

If you happen to use gopher, world-wide-web, or other software than can access gopher, try connecting to gopher.ccs.itd.umich.edu to view public data which we export for gopher/web access. Received on Sat Jan 22 1994 - 04:12:55 CET