bradbury@oracle.UUCP (Robert Bradbury) (10/25/85)
This is partially a response to Laura Reid's comments about Oracle and
partially general information to the people on the network interested in DBMS.
Oracle has run on UNIX since the beginning of 1983. It has been available
on most major UNIX machines since the beginning of 1985. It is the most
widely available RDBMS, running on UNIX, VMS, VM, AOS/VS, MS-DOS and
other operating systems.
Regarding documentation, the screen package, support and UNIX features:
Our documentation has been completely rewritten over the past year to
include generic DBMS documentation and system specific documentation.
The screen/forms packages has been greatly enhanced (it includes a screen
painter) in Oracle Version 5.
There are over 300 people at Oracle with a wide variety of systems experience.
As with most organizations, the key problem is knowing to whom to talk.
The combined Oracle staff has over 50 man years of UNIX experience.
Listed below are the people to contact if you have UNIX specific questions.
Oracle does take advantage of many UNIX features including:
1) It uses the most efficient locking mechanism available on UNIX
[shared memory], rather than the non-standard, inefficient record
locking primitives or requiring special UNIX modifications.
2) It can use raw devices (rather than incurring the overhead of the
UNIX file system and causing time-sharing performance to degrade
whenever a large table scan is done (because the buffer cache gets
filled with database blocks)).
3) It allows the use of the most efficient interprocess communication
methods (from pipes to semaphores, messages and shared memory).
4) It uses the UNIX Set-User-Id facility to provide database protection.
5) It provides tunable asyncronous read-ahead capability. (The 1 block
read-ahead provided by UNIX is totally insufficient for DBMS.)
Some other points for Oracle are:
1) It is the only RDBMS on UNIX which comes close to implementing
the ANSI X3H2 Level 2 standard for SQL [structured query language].
2) It is the most portable RDBMS on the market [in spite of what the
fancy color glossies in the UNIX magazines say], it runs on
3 flavors of UNIX, 8+ other operating systems and 10+ architectures.
This includes the entire AT&T product line from (PC, 3B2,5,20 and UTS).
3) It will be the first RDBMS which allows you to easily move data
between databases on heterogeneous machines and connect to multiple
databases simultaneously (schedueld for 1Q86).
In fact a recent study of DBMS for UNIX by the AT&T Systems Engineering
group found that:
"ORACLE appears to be the overall best package, with UNIFY as the next best"
The network path to Oracle is:
{ihnp4!mhuxl,hplabs}!oracle!{one-of-the-names-below}
Mary Winslow [winslow] - Manager Eastern Region Support
Dave Abbajay [abbajay] - Manager Corporate UNIX Support
Robert Bradbury [bradbury] - Unix Product Manager
Jerry Baker [baker] - Manager of Special Projects
[DG,PRIME,APOLLO & all UNIX]
We will be happy to respond to technical questions regarding the UNIX product.
We are also willing to engage in friendly debate with any of the other UNIX
DBMS vendors who are on the network.
--
Robert Bradbury
Oracle Corporation
(206) 364-1442 {ihnp4!muuxl,hplabs}!oracle!bradbury