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Technology Stocks : Oracle Corporation (ORCL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brian Moore who wrote (8428)	9/22/1998 1:46:00 PM
From: Hardly B. Solipsist	Respond to of 19080

My impression of this is that it's a combination of things. When Ellison talks about it (as opposed to the press, who never get anything quite right) he mentions it as an example of what's cool about Java in the server -- you can add all sorts of new and interesting capabilities. Also, the idea appears to me more that it is a convenient capability that will be "fast enough", not that you will get rid of the disks on your NT machine. We'll just have to see it in action to know for sure.

To: Brian Moore who wrote (8428)	9/22/1998 7:58:00 PM
From: Michael Olin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19080

It depends which piece of "tough" code you're talking about. Stuffing files (any type) into an Oracle database as a BLOB and serving it back out is pretty easy stuff. Sure, "Hey we've already got a database" applies here. The neat thing about iFS is the built in filtering and rendering. The way it works, according to Larry, is that when a file in one of some 60(?) odd native Windows file formats is dropped onto the iFS, the database engine has a filter that translates the file. Oracle can then serve the file back to the application that created it in its native file format or render it in HTML or XML (for a browser so anyone can see it, not just a person running the application that created it). This is "tough" code (Larry joked that the programmer who did it was the same one who they had get around the 640K limit for Oracle on DOS (V4) and that he was now in therapy, expected to fully recover). When questioned about file formats for other OSes, Larry said that Unix is easy because there is already an open standard for portable file transfer (NFS). The what about NT and Novell question is THE QUESTION. When asked if iFS was a threat to NT or SQL Server, Larry picked NT. He sees an Oracle8i database with iFS as eliminating the "dumb" (his word) idea of putting NT servers running their own database and apps out in the field. I specifically asked him about Novell. If O8i/iFS makes NT go away, what about Netware, especially since a 5-user Oracle8 license ships with Netware. He said that Netware is being used simply for file and printer sharing in simple environments and that it is not a difficult system for anyone to manage, so it does its job and can stay around. I suggested that many of the NT systems being deployed do little more than file and print sharing, making them more like Netware systems than distributed applications boxes. My feeling is that he sidestepped the question. He is VERY, VERY smooth. My opinion: iFS is as big a threat to Netware as it is to NT but Oracle can't say that because of its partnership with Novell. Hope this answers some of your questions, and not a word about politics in the post! We may be playing the one-hour Oracle8i presentation on video at the NY Oracle Users Group meeting tomorrow. If we do, I'll see if there is anything significant I might have missed the first time around. -Michael