From owner-freebsd-database Sat May 15 7:54:50 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-database@freebsd.org Received: from yucca.greentree.com (unknown [209.185.105.5]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 923FE15051 for ; Sat, 15 May 1999 07:54:44 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from phil@glatz.com) Received: from winky.greentree.com (rno-max-01-d62.sierra.net [207.135.238.62]) by yucca.greentree.com (8.9.2/8.9.2) with SMTP id HAA22978 for ; Sat, 15 May 1999 07:58:49 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: <4.1.19990515073512.009d89f0@flawless.net> X-Sender: phil@flawless.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1 Date: Sat, 15 May 1999 07:49:24 -0700 To: freebsd-database@freebsd.org From: Phil Glatz Subject: Re: Apache/PHP/Oracle8... In-Reply-To: <199905150907.CAA22229@freebie.dcfinc.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-freebsd-database@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk At 02:07 AM 5/15/99 , Chad R. Larson wrote: >I think that spamming Oracle is a poor way of trying to convince >them that we deserve their attention. Yes! Set an example, we don't like spam. >Collect a list of folks that want a native Oracle for FreeBSD... ...and are willing to pay for it, which is the only way it would make sense for Oracle I'm in the process of moving a large ecommerce site (www.greentree.com) from Informix to Oracle. We use Apache, with PHP as glue. I've been having a difficult time finding other PHP users running Oracle. Seems most people using free/open software are open all the way, with mysql being the database pf choice (it's been my fave for years). It makes me wonder how big a market FreeBSD is for Oracle. Among other things, Oracle is fairly difficult to administer (with power comes complexity), meaning expensive, meaning maybe out of the budget of the typical FreeBSD user. I personally run Oracle on mirrored Sun E450's, which is probably more typical of Oracle installations. Once you get an Oracle license, hire a DBA, do your engineering, and budget the cost of your database folks, the difference between an Intel and Sun box becomes much less of a factor. And Oracle is much more of a known entity on Solaris - would you trust a large enterprise on a brand new database release? I connect to Oracle with some FreeBSD and Linux boxes, but most of our equipment is Sun/Solaris. So the big question is whether it is a big enough market for it to make sense for Oracle to deal with. I have a gut feeling only a very small percentage of FreeBSD installations would benefit from the power and complexity of Oracle, at least natively. I just don't see where the savings would be, compared to the other costs involved. Now a set of native FreeBSD libraries and a listener would make sense. Aside from the Yahoos of the world, how many large enterprises are running large aps on FreeBSD? Oracle is prohibitively expensive for small sites. (and please prove me wrong, I love FreeBSD and at least put up with Oracle). PS - the PHP port to Oracle 8 is still pretty green, we will be using it, but it will be a while before we can use it efficiently as we'd like to (issues involving bound variables, etc.). And you'll probably not be using Oracle development tools (Designer 2000, etc.) on FreeBSD for some time. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phil Glatz (philg@greentree.com) Software Engineer, GreenTree Nutrition 415.844.0145 www.greentree.com San Francisco, CA To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-database" in the body of the message