Conference ulysse::rdb_vms_competition

654.0. "Oracle bits & pieces from DECUS" by 37742::POWELL (Reed B Powell 422-7291 PTO Sales Support) Fri May 18 1990 18:33

    Some tidbits from DECUS in New Orleans,, mostly from listening to
    Oracle present to users, and at their working group meeting (which was
    pretty interactive):
    



          Information Oracle public presentations at DECUS:

          1. Oracle RDMS and most of the ancillary products will ALWAYS
             be available on VMS before any other platforms. VMS is their
             development platform for almost all (?Financials might be the
             exception) of the Oracle products.

          2. Oracle & Digital's distributed lock manager scenario: Oracle
             uses the DLM in two ways, depending upon whether the database
             is setup as single-instance (1 system access to a database
             file) or multiple-instance (multiple system access to a
             single-database). In the single-instance case, for both V5.2
             and V6, Oracle use the DLM only once, during startup, to
             gain exclusive access and lockout anyone who might try to
             get to the file from outside Oracle. In the multi-instance
             case, which currently only exists under V5.2, Oracle uses the
             DLM to control locking for all access to the database file.
             They are researching/developing multi-instance support for a
             future release which gets better performance than under V5.2;
             this is running internally [offline scuttle was that it was
             not ready for V6, and had to be cut from V6 to get V6 out the
             door. No comments on whether they were going to drop usage of
             the DLM as part of the "better performance" goal].

          3. The general answer to many of the user's questions/complaints
             was "fixed in V7" or "being looked at for V.7" When pressed
             on the V7 timeframe, the eventually let out that it was a
             couple of years out. Enforcement of Referential Integrity,
             and the ability for SQL*FORMS calling an external editor were
             two of the big requests that fell into this bucket.

          4. SQL*GRAPH, SQL*CALC are "mature products" and no changes are
             planned

          5. Per-user Licenses for Oracle: See the need, trying to figure
             out how to do it (another V7 future possibility)

          6. GUI for Presentation Manager, MS/Windows is a long term
             project

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          7. Coming in about 2 months (from May 90) on VMS platforms is
             SQL Text Retrieval, which will allow the use of keywords in
             text storing/retrieval. Is in beta-test at the moment.

          8. No plans for work with Britton-Lee. Focus currently has an
             interface for Oracle.

          9. Handling of tables spread across nodes: Should do a view that
             vertically partitions the table; don't do a UNION of smaller
             tables, as this affects the optimizer.

          10.SQL*FORMS V3: Editor can be triggered, future version will
             allow calling your favorite editor externally.

          11.Oracle users group meeting is in Anaheim this September.
























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    "VMS is their development platform for almost all of the Oracle
    products." This is untrue. The Oracle RDBMS and core products are
    developed on VAX. Everything in the way of applications (i.e.
    everything new) is developed on Sequent. That includes Financials,
    Mail, Manufacturing, Distribution, Personnel, etc.
    
    ---- Michael Booth