[Gllug] Snoracle (was Re: new project HA at home and away)

[David L Neil]

Rich,

> I'm still baffled by why people use Oracle (database).  As a developer
> I found it was so much worse than PostgreSQL ...  I certainly don't
> miss the installer-from-hell or having stupid arbitrary limits on the
> length of strings.

At one time Oracle was THE 'disruptor'. Everyone who valued his job 
bought IBM (DB2). Oracle was certainly cheaper, indeed twenty-mumble 
years ago I purchased a person license.

[listens to sounds of already low opinions deflating yet further...] If 
you ever want to define "tele-working" and "thin client", try stacking 
it up against (and we're talking c.late-eighties) PC-AT, ?8MHz CPU, 
640KB ("ought to be enough") RAM, MB-denominated HDDs, PC-DOS, and 
(maybe) a 300-baud acoustic-coupler talking to my System/370 mainframe 
with SNA and ASCII-EBCDIC - and the cost was well-worth my sleep-savings 
and ability to test some code that 'popped into my head' during an 
evening or weekend...
[PS working with such limitations one learned v.quickly not to use (a 
copy of) the live database for testing!!! Practicalities do lead to virtue!]

Oracle and (early) MySQL were based on diametrically-opposed 
philosophies. The latter was built for speed and happily took 
short-cuts, whereas the former went for guarantees, aimed to never lose 
data, journalling, integrity, locks, blah-blah-blah. It is not really 
fair to compare.
(similarly, 'is PG better than MySQL' and other 'religious wars'...)

Whilst SQL is pretty much SQL (even if MySQL didn't include sub-queries 
for a long time (there were work-arounds) and excluding our good 
'friends' at M$ who just have to be different), the specific answer is 
that (to my knowledge) none of the FLOSS-y RDBMS have come-up with 
anything like the tool-sets that are an integral part of Oracle. Oracle 
Forms is a killer-app, but I still cast about looking for a decent 
'generator' which will take a MySQL schema and output some framework-y 
HTML (or GTK if you prefer) - for even basic CRUD interactions. 
Businesses love the idea of a simple tool to extract data into a 
spreadsheet, draw pointy-headed presentation graphs, ...

OTOH is my (beta/free) copy of Ora up-to-date? Whereas which version(s) 
of MySQL do I have running hot? Which of PG? Even which DB2-Express...? 
All kind of confirming your point in another way...

-- 
Regards,
=dn
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