Oracle Lite—Tastes Great, Less Calories

Personal Oracle is a strange name for the single-user, PC version of Oracle. The marketing manager who thought this one up must have come from a soft drink company.

In the fictional Oracle car lot, Personal Oracle is the cute little economy car. The car you buy your kid on his or her 16th birthday. Yet to view Personal Oracle in only this way is misleading, for the greatest value this product has is probably not for the small user, but for the largest Oracle shops.

The reason for this is simply that a large Oracle shop is probably doing a great deal of development, testing, and training. With this product, developers can move off the expensive powerful hardware that runs their business applications and work on their own PCs using Personal Oracle.

In traditional environments, large machines were often shared by developers and business end-users. Oracle was often configured with a production instance and a development instance. The problem with this was that developers tend to be very rough with whatever CPU they are using.

With Personal Oracle, your production machine can remain free from the ravages of developers. Development can occur on PC machines that are less expensive and totally separate from the production environment. This keeps the production machines running faster and free from the junk that development tends to generate.

The beauty of Personal Oracle, as has been the case with Oracle for many years, is the salability of development. A user can write PL/SQL, embedded C, Java, SQL reports, front-end interfaces and have them seamlessly port upwards from the PC to the mainframe or super-computer. This allows the “garage developer” to build a sophisticated Oracle application without the need to bring in a computer on a forklift.

Personal Oracle, allows development and testing to occur on inexpensive PC machines, usually Windows 95 or NT environments. From here, code can be moved “up” to larger machines for testing and finally production.

Personal Oracle makes Oracle an “Enterprise” solution because data can be moved up from this product to larger Oracle8 databases using the Enterprise Edition (see Figure 4.12).

Figure 4.12.  By allowing developers to work on PCs, code can be physically moved to insure accountability in the QA process.

Personal Oracle is also a great way to train developers and testers in using the various aspects of the Oracle product line they need to know. I suspect many of you who are reading this now are programmers, Oracle gurus, and DBAs who all want to learn more about Oracle to enhance your careers.

Well aside from browsing material like this, which, granted, is probably less expensive than a prescription of sleeping pills, all of you Oracle devotees should spend some time with Personal Oracle. If you can write the triggers, procedures, and SQL on Personal Oracle, you can do it on any Oracle platform.

Oracle offers many programs for developers who want to learn more about its products and eventually master them. Personal Oracle can be obtained for a few hundred dollars by joining the Oracle Technology Network, formally known as the Oracle Developer Programme.

Aside from the brave individuals who want to learn Oracle, large companies should consider Personal Oracle as a training tool for both developers and end-users. Why should anyone train people on their most expensive hardware that is used for production or critical development when the same training can be done on a PC?

By training users on Personal Oracle, and by allowing developers to work on these separate Oracle environments, a company will also save the development headache of needing DBAs to support development and training. DBAs waste a great deal of time in political struggles with developers, and as being general “den mothers” for chaotic development machines, when they should be concentrating on optimizing business-critical production applications. Oracle Lite can save you a great deal of money in this type of waste.

By employing a multi-platform development strategy such as this, the quality assurance process will also benefit. Instead of having different developers building critical tables and other database objects, these objects can remain free from developer’s whims and be built with a single uniform style on larger machine. If a developer needs a table to test with, he or she can simply create it on his or her PC. Later, a design expert can recreate the necessary table in testing and production environment.

Code that may be chaotic on each of the developers PCs can be moved up the hardware chain for testing on a stable schema. Code will need to be physically moved for acceptance. This decreases the chances that at any point in time throughout the development life-cycle, untested code will sneak its way into a production area. This also makes better use of developers’ time. With this they do not have to wait for DBAs to work on modifying databases and giving them passwords for databases they need to use in development of their software.

Operating System Wars—UNIX Versus NT

Right now, even if you have mastered the concepts in this chapter and understand the evolution of the Oracle RDBMS, you, like I, are still deep in “no man’s land” as the UNIX versus NT operating system war rages on. You may not know it, but shells are exploding all around us that may shape the future landscape of database computing.