I’ve mentioned a couple of times recently that I’m in the process of installing and moving a whole bunch of servers from our current site to a new location. Well the first phase of this process was completed over the weekend. The move involved a change in platform from Alpha to Linux for a few projects, including some Oracle database servers.
I do pretty well all my Extraction Transformation Load (ETL) processes from within the database using SQL and PL/SQL, which by its nature is portable between Oracle supported platforms. As a result, everything just worked.
Some of the other non-Oracle projects use shell scripts and Perl (containing calls to OS commands), which can prove a little more problematic. I’ve just finished helping debug a Perl script that was failing due to the difference in output of the “ps -p <pid>” command on Alpha and RHEL. Imagine how big the impact would have been if the move had been between Windows and Linux!
This just reminds my how “keeping it in the database” has paid off for me again and again. When I treat Oracle as my platform life is easy. When I treat Oracle as a “bit bucket” and focus on external technologies I run into problems.
Just an observation by a biased PL/SQL junkie… Not flame bait… 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
There’s me writing non-portable Perl code again… What is the world coming to !
Maybe it should have been something like “ps -o args -p “. That should work on both Tru64 and Linux !!
Cheers,
Rob
Sounds like a vote for APEX to me 😉
Carl
As this was a bolt-on solution to a poorly developed application, the issue is not with the choice of technology, but with the implementation of the technology. I’d be intrigued to know which version of APEX was available when we begun developing the application in about 1985….. Or PL/SQL for that matter….
I’m quite sure I could write a duff application either APEX or PL/SQL!!
Not flame bait…. 😉
Bryan: As you know, everything I do is very database-centric, so it’s easy for me to abstract myself from the OS. I appreciate this isn’t the case in many other environments…
Carl: The systems in question weren’t Oracle systems.
It was just an observation. I’m sure there are lots of Java guys who would say using Java for everything makes you platform agnostic… 🙂
Cheers
Tim…