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Have you ever been subjected to one of those "high level" meetings where your entire infrastructure is laid to waste with a flash of managerial prerogative?
I had one of those last week, when we reviewed the license fees for our current Oracle implementation of about 30 databases. The contract some of those puppies functions under needs to be upgraded and it's not an insignificant chunk of change. So... end of meeting the question is posed, "Think we could move some of those apps to Microsoft's SQL Server?" "Um... well... not these ones, but the in house stuff... I guess." "Good, use SQL Server for the current project we have under development." "Right, no problem."
I'm probably not as put out as I could be, I like playing with new stuff. Microsoft stole the thing from Sybase years ago and I'm having flash backs to my HP-UX Sybase days. Also, the SQL Server frontend is a triumph of GUI over function, even our backup guys can handle it. This means, if I can make it work on SQL Server, I can shift some maintenance tedium downstream.
Yesterday I found out that select * from [ExternalDataSource]...[Customer] and select * from OpenQuery(ExternalDataSource, 'select * from [Customer]') differ in that only one works, even though they're supposed to be functionally equivalent. Great fun.
Today, I find "SQL Server Migration Assistant for Oracle V1.0" is a free download from Microsoft; figures right? Anyway, after it's installed I fire it up and it fails. Seems it needs something... "The important prerequisite is JRE 1.4.2, which should be installed on your computer." I nearly fell off my chair.
So, to recap, to migrate an Oracle database to Microsoft it need to install a product from Sun. I only have maybe five different Java versions on this box, this shouldn't be a problem...
I had one of those last week, when we reviewed the license fees for our current Oracle implementation of about 30 databases. The contract some of those puppies functions under needs to be upgraded and it's not an insignificant chunk of change. So... end of meeting the question is posed, "Think we could move some of those apps to Microsoft's SQL Server?" "Um... well... not these ones, but the in house stuff... I guess." "Good, use SQL Server for the current project we have under development." "Right, no problem."
I'm probably not as put out as I could be, I like playing with new stuff. Microsoft stole the thing from Sybase years ago and I'm having flash backs to my HP-UX Sybase days. Also, the SQL Server frontend is a triumph of GUI over function, even our backup guys can handle it. This means, if I can make it work on SQL Server, I can shift some maintenance tedium downstream.
Yesterday I found out that select * from [ExternalDataSource]...[Customer] and select * from OpenQuery(ExternalDataSource, 'select * from [Customer]') differ in that only one works, even though they're supposed to be functionally equivalent. Great fun.
Today, I find "SQL Server Migration Assistant for Oracle V1.0" is a free download from Microsoft; figures right? Anyway, after it's installed I fire it up and it fails. Seems it needs something... "The important prerequisite is JRE 1.4.2, which should be installed on your computer." I nearly fell off my chair.
So, to recap, to migrate an Oracle database to Microsoft it need to install a product from Sun. I only have maybe five different Java versions on this box, this shouldn't be a problem...