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Apple Businesses

Oracle 9i Makes it to Mac OS X 50

Posted by pudge from the i-knew-the-day-would-come-like-a-hellfire-upon-the-lands dept.
mcockerill writes "Oracle just posted a development version of their latest RDBMS (Oracle 9i release 2) for Mac OS X (300+megs of it). It requires Jaguar to run. No fancy installation wizards or GUI config apps as yet; the whole thing is command line only for now. But still, this is a major development as far as serious use of Mac OS X in a server environment is concerned. It's long been rumored to be on the way -- after all, Ellison is on Apple's Board -- but frankly I never thought I'd see the day."
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Oracle 9i Makes it to Mac OS X More

Oracle 9i Makes it to Mac OS X

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  • Saw this comming... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Quicksilver31337 ( 541929 ) <kariudo@g m a il.com> on Friday August 23, 2002 @10:27AM (#4126570) Journal
    If you have the a dev release of 10.2 there is a ODBC control app in the utilities folder, likey implemented with this in mind.

    However as of now it seems to lack any drivers.
  • Interesting that it only supports X.2. I would expect it to support older versions, as I was under the impression that X.2 mostly did stuff to the UI, but if there is no backwards compatibility for a CLI application, maybe that did some other things.

    Anyone tried installing on an older X system?


    • I was under the impression that X.2 mostly did stuff to the UI, ...

      Mostly, but a fair amount of stuff is also happening at the Darwin/BSD level. One thing I know about in particular is that BSD-style signal handling is supposed to be in 10.2, which might allow porting of CMUCL (a kick-ass free-as-in-beer Common Lisp) with minimal pain and suffering.
    • If you install on 10.1.5, it gives an error about a missing symbol _localtime_r the first time it runs sqlplus (which is fairly early during database creation). Also the shell scripts use bash by default, although syntactically they seem to do OK when run under sh.
  • Beyond the argument of XServer speed, there will soon be the requirement for SCSI drives for the XServe. IDE just doesn't cut it under decent loads. If I were to build an Oracle 9i server today on an OSX Server, I'd add a RAID card and an external storage array. I personally would love to see Apple offer this equipment, but surely sales #'s will have to go up for the XServe.

    My question is, I wonder who Apple/Oracle think the target market is for the combo?

    • Re:Database Hardware (Score:5, Informative)

      by foobar104 ( 206452 ) on Friday August 23, 2002 @11:10AM (#4126924) Journal
      Beyond the argument of XServer speed, there will soon be the requirement for SCSI drives for the XServe. IDE just doesn't cut it under decent loads.

      There's zero reason to put SCSI drives inside an Xserve. You're not doing any IO-bound tasks on the root drive anyway. If you need IO performance, you use an external Fibre Channel JBOD or RAID. (Internal RAID card? What's the point? Software RAID costs less and performs the same. If you really need performance, you use a hardware RAID controller.)

      I personally would love to see Apple offer this equipment, but surely sales #'s will have to go up for the XServe..

      Like, oh I don't know, Xserve RAID, maybe?

      (Can't find a picture of Xserve RAID on Apple's site, since it hasn't been released yet. But if you saw or attended the Xserve roll-out, you've seen it. It's a 2 Gb storage system with dual RAID controllers and 1.6 TB of capacity per disk chassis.)

      • Re:Database Hardware (Score:2, Interesting)

        by drsmithy ( 35869 )
        There's zero reason to put SCSI drives inside an Xserve. You're not doing any IO-bound tasks on the root drive anyway.

        I would propose to you that a significant number of customers could and would be performing some serious I/O on the ca. 150GB you could fit inside an Xserve with SCSI drives. Why spend extra on an external RAID chassis just to serve up some files to a few hundred users ?

        Software RAID costs less and performs the same.

        Unfortunately OS X's software RAID is pretty dismal. Unless it's improved markedly in 10.2.

        If you really need performance, you use a hardware RAID controller.

        Which is why they should have put an IDE RAID controller into the Xserve. Shit, it's not like a 4-channel 3ware card is particularly expensive, so an OEM on-the-board equivalent should have been par for the course.
        It's just another example of Apple only going halfway towards a great solution. Killing the floppy with the iMac was another (great that they killed it - absolutely stupid that they didn't *replace* it).

        • Killing the floppy with the iMac was another (great that they killed it - absolutely stupid that they didn't *replace* it).

          You mean with a CDRW standard in all Macs? Yeah. Sucks that they didn't add that feature....
          • Killing the floppy with the iMac was another (great that they killed it - absolutely stupid that they didn't *replace* it).

            You mean with a CDRW standard in all Macs? Yeah. Sucks that they didn't add that feature....

            What sucks is that it took them 3 years for writable CD media of any kind to be standard on all Macs. Seriously, the iMac dates from 1998, and I don't think CD-R(W) was stock on everything until last year. Actually, Jobs famously had to say "we screwed up on that" when analysts asked him what took them so long in getting writable optical media into their product lines. I've got an (otherwise quite nice) iMac DV SE that has a DVD-ROM drive...but no built-in CD burner. It really was a bizarre screw-up.

            To be frank, they really should stop shipping anything less than a combo drive (CD-RW/DVD) any minute now, and stop shipping anything less than a super drive (CD-RW/DVD-R(W?)) by next year.

        • Killing the floppy with the iMac was another (great that they killed it - absolutely stupid that they didn't *replace* it).

          They did replace the floppy - with networking. The iMac shipped with fast & easy networking built in, either via ethernet or dial-up. Thus between reading CD's and networking it's trvial to get material on & off of an iMac. Later iDisk was rolled out to make it even easier. Now that iMacs ship with CD burners standard it's plain trivial.

          For those that really have a burning need for a floppy drive then they either shouldn't get an iMac or need to budget for an external floppy drive/superdrive/whatever. However for the target iMac audience that wasn't an issue: Few of them had any collection of must-read floppies and those with knew what they were buying. Saddling the rest of us with a dusty drive port wasn't needed and yeah, lots of us never missed it.

          ps. I've a styrofoam cooler of Mac floppies in the basement, never needed to read any of them on the iMac. Ok, looked longingly at the "After Dark: Star Trek Edition" one once but then recalled how buggy AD was, didn't look back.

          • They did replace the floppy - with networking. The iMac shipped with fast & easy networking built in, either via ethernet or dial-up. Thus between reading CD's and networking it's trvial to get material on & off of an iMac. Later iDisk was rolled out to make it even easier.

            Not very useful for getting that assignment to school to print. Not everyone has broadband. Hell, not every has 'net connectivity and neither does every school (for the Americans, school in this instance means K-12). This is even assuming you have somewhere useful to network *to*, and not taking into account wanting to backup important things.

            For those that really have a burning need for a floppy drive then they either shouldn't get an iMac or need to budget for an external floppy drive/superdrive/whatever.

            I didn't wan't a floppy drive in the iMac, I wanted a CDRW. Killing the floppy was a great idea. Not replacing it was dumb. Network != removable media.

            • Whine whine whine.

              Right - iMac didn't come with a floppy. Or other removable media. If you wanted that you had to buy it seperately.

              Was that a bad thing? Well the iMac was the best selling PC for several years running so apparently not.

              BTW - If someone's gonna cough up a grand or more US$ for an iMac they can budget in the external media or printer or whatever, and apparently they did.

    • My question is, I wonder who Apple/Oracle think the target market is for the combo?

      I think they're targeting the sciences and education markets where Apple already has a market presence. (Dare I say "decent market presence"?)
    • I have no particular insight so YMMV:

      To get stuff Oracle Developer Suite to work you need a native version of the database that can run in personal mode. Its almost no more work to create the server version (though not the enteprise version) than the personal version.

      Lots of developers are talking about how much they like the Mac environment; and Oracle wants them using Developer Suite. Given the fact that Oracle already supports lots of Unixs its not really that hard to get the server version to run on OSX. At least on their Windows version the whole interface is Javaish anyway so it doesn't look a tough port.

      So IMHO they are creating Oracle Server as a first step to Oracle Personal (which will get used) as a step towards Developer Suite.

  • CLI Undesirable? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Xunker ( 6905 ) on Friday August 23, 2002 @11:16AM (#4126973) Homepage Journal

    "the whole thing is command line only for now."

    This is bad? Come on! We're been waiting for a real command line on a Mac for, like, 20 years, and now we need a lickable interface for a database engine?

    Some of us dream in CLI, you know? :)

  • Client side tools needed! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by d3xt3r ( 527989 ) on Friday August 23, 2002 @11:50AM (#4127274)
    Glad to see Oracle is finally making a public release of 9i for OS X, but what I really want are the development tools.

    Oracle has given us a cross-platform version of Enterprise Manager, but it still sucks on anything other than Windows. The OEM included with 9i, Release 2 for Linux constantly locks up, or takes too long to conduct simple operations.

    I think that OS X represents a great OS to finally replace MS Windows as the developement platform of choice. What we need are things like OEM for OS X, not just the database.

    I hope these tools come soon.

    • Glad to see Oracle is finally making a public release of 9i for OS X, but what I really want are the development tools.

      Then what you really should be doing is asking Apple to move WebObjects out the the Java ghetto they stuck it in and divorce EOF from WOF. EOF was amazingly adept at database-independent development, so getting it back would get you access to not only Oracle, but most other databases that came to the OS X platform. Pitty Apple got so entranced by the Java/Web angle, and has yet to make corrections after the Internet bubble burst. You can still scrounge up a copy of WebObjects 4.5.1, but I don't know if it'll be (or needs to be) update to work with 10.2; again, bug Apple.

    • I managed to get TOra to compile and kind of run under 10.1 using the old 8.1.7 oracle drivers and the X11 version of Qt.

      It does a few funny things, and locks up randomly from time to time, but it kind of works
    • Since JDeveloper is 100% pure Java, it actually already can be made to work on OS X. Oracle don't currently tell you how, but there are details of how to get it up and running here:

      http://www.mactelligence.com/info/Java/

  • DBD::Oracle (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hondo77 ( 324058 ) on Friday August 23, 2002 @12:05PM (#4127418) Homepage
    When do I get to put DBD::Oracle on my Mac? That's what this Perl guy wants to know.
  • Anyone else notice that the 9 in 9i [oracle.com] and 9 in Mac OS 9 [cnn.com] are identical? I guess it's a good thing that Jobs and Ellison are buddy-buddy or somebody's lawyers would be whacking someone else's lawyers over their heads with giant salamis.
    • Is any end customer likely to get the two products confused? That's one of the requirements for having that kind of a suit. Apple tire company relasing their new OSX (overdrive support ten) would probably win a defensive suit against Apple computer :-)

  • Way back in the day, when Apple was selling a 68K-based Unix server running A/UX, Oracle provided a full version of its DBMS that ran on that OS. I think it was Oracle 6, but I don't remember. We had one in our shop for awhile. It's good to see Oracle on Mac again.
  • Ok, some Sparc Binaries and Libs crept in - but all and all - following the release notes; you'll have apache, tomcat, jdbc and a full Oracle 9i up and running inside the hour.

    Best oracle Beta I've seen in a long time.

    It just works !

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