Re: help with site+database
On Thu, 19 Jul 2001 01:06, Craig Sanders wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 18, 2001 at 05:41:11PM +0200, Russell Coker wrote:
> > A few months ago I tried installing Oracle on a Debian system, I
> > didn't even want Oracle itself, I only wanted the client libraries for
> > talking to an Oracle server and the software development kit. So I
> > wanted the libraries, Perl libraries, and the SQL interpreter.
>
> any reason why DBD::Oracle wasn't good enough?
>
> hmmm, i guess DBD::Oracle needed the oracle libraries too...
I believe that was the case. I didn't investigate it too closely though, I
wasn't interested into getting into the overall design of the Oracle side of
things as I had lots of other things to concentrate on.
> that kind of broken installer crap is pretty common to commercial
> software.
Could be worse though. CA software has install instructions that start with
"type umask 0" because they want to create directories that are world
writable for storing binaries (including binaries that are run as root from
cron jobs). CA programmers are stupid enough to want to do that, and stupid
enough to not know how to change the umask themselves!
> it's one more reason for preferring free software. "./configure ; make
> install" is much easier and far more reliable. and "apt-get install" is
> much easier again.
Yes. I would happily donate some of my time to create Debian packages of
Oracle if Oracle would continue to produce them. But they wouldn't be
interested.
> oracle's feature set would have to be absolutely essential with no
> possible work-around for any given application before i'd willingly
> suffer the pain of installing and configuring it. postgres has proven to
> be more than adequate for my database needs so far.
The only potentially compelling feature of Oracle is multi-master
replication. According to the review published in the June 2001 issue of
Linux Magazine there is only one free database that supports replication,
MySQL (which we agree has deficiencies). Also MySQL only supports
single-master replication.
So if you need replication and all the features of row locking etc, or if you
need multi-master replication then you must get a commercial database.
> i certainly wouldn't choose oracle for any web application. web sites
> just don't need the CYA respectability of a major brand name like
> oracle, and they don't need the overhead either.
Yes. There's another issue as well, support.
I once worked at a site running a Solaris clustered environment with Veritas
file system, an Oracle database which was used as the back-end to a
proprietary mail server program.
So when things really went wrong you needed expertise on Sun clustering,
Veritas, Oracle, and the mail server. That requires at least three people!!!
The situation of requiring three people from different countries working
together to solve a problem is not a nice one.
> as far as i can tell, oracle gets recommended by consultants because
> it's a very recognised brand name, but mostly because of the enormous
> kickbacks provided by oracle (only "discounts" aka kickbacks greater
> than 95% have to be approved by senior management...anything less can be
> just agreed to by the sales consultant).
You call them kickbacks. Does Oracle actually give cash to people who
recommend it's use?
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