Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!umix!metavax!oxtrap!hal!ncoast!allbery From: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) Newsgroups: comp.databases Subject: Re: ORACLE on the cheap... questions Message-ID: <8208@ncoast.UUCP> Date: 2 Jul 88 22:51:38 GMT References: <5165@dasys1.UUCP> Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) Followup-To: comp.databases Organization: Cleveland Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, Oh Lines: 37 As quoted from <5165@dasys1.UUCP> by tbetz@dasys1.UUCP (Tom Betz): +--------------- | Just today received ORACLE's offer of ORACLE-PC for $199, and ORACLE-*NIX | for $399.00, both including their SQL*Forms, Plus, Report, Calc, and Pro*C | Pre-Compiler. | | This is a pretty heavy mark-down, and makes me suspicious... but also piques | my interest. It's an obvious grab for market share, but I want to inquire: | does Oracle support such things as transaction logs, roll-back and roll-forward, | the features that Zim and Progress, among others, offer? | | Is it strictly an SQL, or does it have some of the richness of functions | available with Progress, and to a greater extent, with Zim? +--------------- The only restriction in the $199/$399 version is in the license: you can only use it for development, to use it as a "live" system you have to fork over the rest of the full price. --But, judging from how many people pay for "shareware" programs, I daresay that in practice people use it as if they had a full license anyway. (I do *not* advocate doing so, I'm merely making an observation.) Oracle has rollback, rollforward, and transaction logs. The version I used (5.1) wasn't too hot on the speed front (watch, however, for Turbo Oracle) and SQL*Forms and SQL*Report are miserable compared to tools designed for Unix (they both act like what they are: designed for VMS -- and they are therefore lacking in flexibility Unix types take for granted, such as support for multiple terminals/printers). The SQL supports quite a few more functions than (say) Informix or Unify, but not as many as Progress. Nor can new functions be linked into SQL. (Oracle, if you're listening, this would be a big help!!! So would (a) making multiple terminals w/graphics in SQL*Forms work and (b) releasing that new SQL*ReportWriter for more than just VMS.) -- Brandon S. Allbery, uunet!marque!ncoast!allbery DELPHI: ALLBERY For comp.sources.misc send mail to ncoast!sources-misc