Flutterby™! : Oracle licensing 2004-03-02 21:45:23.398918+00

Oracle licensing

2004-03-02 21:45:23.398918+00 by Dan Lyke 8 comments

Bwahahahahaha! We're wondering what it would take to make our app run on top of the Oracle rather than Microsoft SQL Server. Probably nothing, but we should test it before we promise our customers that. So I go to the Oracle website, and note that they have a 0% Easy Lease that...

...lets you acquire the Oracle solution you need today--without an upfront capital investment.

"No Credit? No Problem. You can drive off the lot with no money down! Here at honest Larry's used software...". They even have a Software Investment Guide, because buying software is always an investment in your future.

Last quarter, somebody here at school told me that Oracle has always had a freely available (Lite?) Linux version . I thought I remembered finding and downloading it a month or so back, but I don't seem to be able to remember where I put it.

As of last check (8 months ago?), Oracle would let anyone download anything. ANY product they offer. They're licensed for testing/eval only, but are not functionally limited in any fashion. You do have to promise not to use it to build nuclear weapons, though. (not kidding)

You might want to look into Postgresql (postgresql.org). Much of Oracle's yummy goodness (ACID, transactions, server-side programming language, text indexing) at a much more reasonable price (free) and much easier to administer.

The Oracles for Linux are the Real Version, 8i was missing some of the INSO filters for the text indexing, but it was the same product, same features, same bugs as the Solaris version we were also running. Officially it was "free for development, pay out the nose for deployment", but there is no license server, so you could deploy it if you want. You just can't get support.

MarkD: If you're reading this, you're soaking in PostgreSQL with lots of that stored procedure and triggers yummy goodness (and more than one "Oh crap, ROLLBACK that transaction" when I forgot to specify a WHERE clause to an UPDATE.). This is specifically for a customer who's running Oracle, and while PostgreSQL does a pretty darned good job of implementing the ANSI

SQL

spec, neither Microsoft SQL Server nor Oracle do. What we're looking for is funkiness like subtleties in date handling, similar type conversion issues, that sort of thing.

It's all there: "All software downloads are free, and each comes with a development license that allows you to use full versions of the products only while developing and prototyping your applications. You can buy Oracle products with full-use licenses at any time from the online Oracle Store or from your Oracle sales representative."

If you're looking for Windows versions of the RDBMS, You need to drill down to 9i from the 10g page, because 9i is the latest Windows release.

The problem, of course, is getting Oracle's servers to give you the whole damned thing. I'm going with the Linux version because it appears that the customers using Oracle are generally running in Un*x environments anyway.

Huh, I wouldn't have expected that problem. Oracle.com's general webserving performance is crap, but a download from there was my only coast to coast transfer to exceed an average of 1 MB/second.

I had a series of problems, kept getting reset connections and stalls 300 meg in with IE and Mozilla on Windows, Opera let me restart, but saved the file as uncompressed at the length of the compressed file, finally Lynx got me through it.