Re: Oracle sucks!

henryl_at_bengaldevelopment.com (Henry Lafleur) wrote:

>TurkBear <john.greco_at_dot.state.mn.us> wrote in message news:<t715bv89fl023c1aa80cdpuf8349nnl8q4_at_4ax.com>...
>
>I take issue with your points a little bit, although they are mostly
>valid.
>
>>
>> Great points ,Nuno, about 'open source' ...A lot of non-IT managers see the cost ( free) and figure that it has to be more
>> economical to use free stuff than to pay big bucks for something that they don't see as much different...
>>
>> Those are the people who , to paraphrase someone, 'know the price of everything but the value of nothing'.
>>
>> The 'true' cost of something includes the purchase price, the support costs( contract or salaries to IT support staff), the
>> ongoing update/maintenance changes and their cost in down time, person-hours, etc.
>>
>
>Open source advocates like to call this "Free Beer" versus "Free
>Speech". PostgreSQL is free in that 1) it costs nothing to acquire and
>2) you are free to change and fix the code. I've used PostgreSQL as a
>low traffic web site backend, and it never even hickuped. It cost me
>maybe a week's worth of learning the system, but that would be the
>case with any database system. If you wanted to use it on a large
>scale, it will cost time, benchmarking, etc. (It took us a week to
>install and reinstall and reinstall...Oracle server last month before
>it decided to run fast, and not in slow motion, though--I
>digress--some of that was network card problems.)
>
>But lets be honest, Oracle is not for the feint of heart. If it
>weren't for ORAFAQ, these newsgroups, and a bunch of other stuff, we'd
>be screwed. How much does Oracle charge for support, anyway?
>
>> Also, and most importantly, IMHO, the lack of technical support from the manufacturer of the product, whose knowledge of the
>> product will (or should be) greater then any end user can develop is a major drawback to open source software..
>>
>
>I completely disagree, also IMHO. In the Open Source software that I
>have used for business, I find help is easier to find than closed
>source software. Typically, there are consultants for any Open Source
>software that you can find. Also there is much support from the
>Internet. I have not had experience with Oracle support, but Oracle
>database has a very good support group on the Internet (except on my
>HostName question, but I digress) with these newsgroups and orafaq and
>other things. When you compare the Microsoft products to Open Source
>for support, that is where the constrasts start to come in. Then
>companies go out of business--Open Source defeats this by letting the
>community handle this.
>
>> Add to this the need to be compatible with various OSs, existing systems, legacy data, etc. and no corporation is going to
>> jump into software that is still mainly a techie project...
>>
>
>Also on this one, I find that Open Source works across many more
>platforms than proprietary software. As far as interoperability, I was
>feeding PostgreSQL from SQLServer using SQL Server's DTS without any
>problems. (You could feed it from Oracle with DTS also.) I can open
>Word documents in AbiWord. If that doesn't work, I can use OpenOffice.
>It depends on the app (just like proprietary). No doubt, Open Source
>has a long way to go before it is accepted by corporations, but I
>think that it's on its way. There are bunches of early corporate
>adopters already out there (Burlington, IBM, Apple, etc.). Oracle even
>bundles Apache with Oracle Database.
>
>See this argument on PostgreSQL:
>
>http://advocacy.postgresql.org/advantages/
>
>I would say that Oracle is an exception, probably because it's user
>base comes out of the Unix community which is much friendlier than the
>Windows community. You can't run SQL Server much less connect to it
>from Linux without either a reverse engineered (open source) driver or
>a very expensive one that requires a Windows component.
>
>> Just my 2c.....
>>
>> John
>>
>> ----== Posted via Newsfeed.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==----
>> http://www.newsfeed.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! >100,000 Newsgroups
>> ---= 19 East/West-Coast Specialized Servers - Total Privacy via Encryption =---
>
>Henry.
Thanks for the feedback Henry..
Rational, well thought out replies are why newsgroups can be very informative...

John

----== Posted via Newsfeed.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==---- http://www.newsfeed.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! >100,000 Newsgroups ---= 19 East/West-Coast Specialized Servers - Total Privacy via Encryption =--- Received on Fri May 02 2003 - 21:13:38 CEST