From: "Ralph \"PJPizza\" Siegler" <pjpizza@...>
Date: 2005-07-07T06:49:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Marketing a system that relies on a component that is alpha version 0.1


as long as you're going to advocate bleeding edge technology like ruby and ruby-on-rails, why wouldn't  you use a robust open source databASe engine instead of Oracle, with its fearsome costs and nightmare complexity?

I make good money building RAC and PDC clusters in my duties as Unix/Linux engineer for a VAR, but for my own business I use Postgresql. 

I think you'll find that OS developers in general aren't going to be focusing on Oracle; rather how to get rid of that thing.  Getting past the marketing hype, Oracle really is an '80's technology that's had layers of bloat and kludges slapped on over the years, now with a rube goldberg contraption type of clustering cobbled together and a half-baked clustering filesystem that is NOT industrial stength.

Just as corporations are now wising up that there are alternatives to Unix(tm) for the majority of biz apps, so they will with dbms as money gets tighter. 



On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 05:15:45AM +0900, Jenjhiz wrote:
> No matter how good the programming language is, no matter how easy it
> is to develop database centric application with it, if the application
> relies critically on a software component that is alpha version 0.1 the
> last 7 years or so, and rarely upgraded, I  will be laughed off if I
> suggest to use such an application for corporate computing. But such is
> the case with Ruby and Ruby on Rails relying on Oracle OCI8. Oracle
> OCI8 has been alpha 0.1 since the first time I saw it (7 years ago?),
> rarely upgraded (though the last one was May 2005). The perception is
> that the developer of the driver perceives the driver to be *that much*
> a long way to being production version 1.0, and has no time or desire
> to get it to production robustness, and its development progress is
> slower than the speed of a snail travelling across a path covered with
> molasses.
> 
> If OCI8 is ready for production use now, don't be too modest, call it
> version 1.0. If not, work to convey that there is a path to it getting
> there soon. The battle for tool makers appears to have settled down;
> lines have been drawn among Ruby, PHP, Python. The next battle is over
> the minds and hearts of business database programmers. There's a lot of
> VB, Delphi, PowerBuilder, and Oracle Developer developers to be won
> over. You can't even be a contender in this battle if you don't have
> database drivers perceived as active players and that perform  with
> industrial strength.
> 
> gk
> 
>