[thelist] Oracle for Dummies

[Daniel J. Cody]

Hey Andrew -

Good questions

Andrew Forsberg wrote:
> Hullo Evolt
[snip]
> Oracle 8i and (now) 9i database apps come with feature lists that look 
> like the last decade's high tech headlines crammed onto an A4 page -- 
> which doesn't scare me so much as it causes me to be highly skeptical. 
> What I'd like is some informed advice regarding what the concrete 
> advantages are for web developers to develop and deploy on Oracle 
> databases.
> 
>  From Dan's comments it's obvious that evolt.org chooses Oracle -- but 
> why? No, I'm not being a smart arse (and I'm definitely *NOT* fishing 
> for a religious war), just interested in the pros and cons, and perhaps 
> an example or two of how the features are actually useful.

To be honest, we started using oracle because Access wasn't cutting it 
at all ;)

We went to oracle because i used to work with a couple people that had 
gotten me into it(so much in fact that I gave 4 seminars last summer on 
oracle+linux, but thats another story), and were serious oracle wiz's. 
Once i(and everyone else) started using it, I think we really liked it. 
The enterprise level features that oracle offers are top quality and 
can't be beat, period. Not that evolt is an enterprise quality site, but 
we like to pretend ;)

Some of those enterprise features info you'd best get from 
technet.oracle.com where you can usually find pretty straightforward 
non-marketing answers about oracle products. oracle also works nicely 
with Cold Fusion, and also important is that it runs on linux very 
nicely. All of the extra apps that come with oracle 9i like application 
server, IFS(internet file system), are really cool, but like MS once you 
start getting to deep into their product line, you need to stay in their 
product line. and thats good for most people, because they like the 'one 
solution' kind of mantra.

also, dean mah, who's an oracle god is an admin member too, so thats a 
bonus to have someone on hand :)

if you're looking for a move up from mysql, oracle is probably overkill. 
it does take some know-how to run and get set up(which if you decide to 
go with it, feel free to ask here.. lots of fun things about installing 
oracle you'll wanna know :) a nice solution in between is postgreSQL 
which has been compared to oracle 7.x in terms of features and 
stability, which is pretty damn good. oh, and its free too.

we actually just upgraded our oracle box for evolt.. before it was 
always a shared oracle server with whoever i happened to work for, 
whereas now(for 2 weeks) its been on a seperate box all its own, and has 
seriously kicked ass. the front page for evolt takes about 6 seconds 
fewer to load these days, which is nice with the amount of traffic we're 
getting lately.

anyways, i know i'm not real specific. shout ifyou have any more 
questions :)

.djc.