Hello:

I have seen OpenInsight and find it a good tool. My organization wants to use Oracle. What can I tell them why OpenInsight is better than Oracle.

We have less than 100 users on windows NT.

Thanks you-

Harold

Well it really depends on where they're coming from. The major benefits we see over over Oracle are :-

Reduced lifecycle costs

Increased development flexibility

Tool set better suited to post relational architectures

Easier to learn

All in one nature of OI means buying no more tools if you don't want to.

No need for full time DBA

Programming language tightly couple to database

Flexibility to update Oracle/SQL/Notes/ODBC if required

Consultancy is cheaper than Oracle consultancy

We're sure that others have their pet reasons too!

The Sprezzatura Group

World Leaders in all things RevSoft

Besides,

No-one uses Oracle.

No-one uses Oracle.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by that but in our world we can pretty claim that to be true. Several companies that we work with have purchased Oracle but I dare say that it's a far cry from actually using the product successfully.

We are constantly amazed, and frustrated, by the willingness of our clients who think nothing to drop over $1M on an Oracle solution that never pans out to its fullest hyped-up potential and yet they strain the gnat over spending pennies on the dollar for a proven OpenInsight solution. It does seem to prove that marketing is king.

dbakke@srpcs.com

SRP Computer Solutions, Inc.

Oracle is optimized for large corporations with large IT staffs.

In such organizations, data volume is a bigger problem than data volatility. In other words, they are more worried about handling massive amounts of data than they are about the cost of adapting to changing business rules. Embedded in the product is an assumption that you will have a group of people dedicated to tuning it for large volumes of data, and that you will have another group of full time analysts and programmers to adapt the database whenever the business rules change. In short, to guarantee support for huge volumes of data they have accepted a high cost for supporting change. Since change is a constant in business, you can expect to have high lifetime costs for Oracle applications.

OpenInsight is optimized for supporting volatility. The ideas embedded in the product - our internal data structures are a sort of stripped down XML, our dictionarys are a simple way to bind rules to data like OO databases, our event model is discovery based, like .htc behaviors in Internet Explorer - yield a product that adapts well to change. For small to medium sized organizations like yours the risks posed by volatility, especially the opportunity cost of taking too long to adapt, are usually a bigger issue than the risks posed by data volume.

In short, Oracle is optimized to scale for volume, OpenInsight is optimized to scale for complexity; changes in complexity are more likely the critical issue for a company your size.

HTH

Bob

Aw shucks Steve

You dont really mean that

Youre just jealous that they had a marketing department

And to Don's reply - Yes, True

And to Bob's reply - bloody wonderful summary.

I would add though that an Open Insight system that looked after the non-gigantic volume applications in a large corporation would eventually have a large amount of access to an Oracle database.

Sort of like the little man controlling the great big bullocks.

Oracle has the power, Open Insight (Arev) has the intelligence.

Harold,

I would consider myself to be a fairly objective person when it comes to OI, because I have not used it for active development purposes for 8 years (plus the 2 years I worked at RTI) and during the last 7 years I have worked in MS SQL and Oracle shops only. So . . .

The really good things about Oracle include: The scalability and reliability are outstanding, great programming support (everything from the C interface to the latest ADO.NET provider), hardware/OS independence (not a big deal today, but it is cool to see your app running on 4 clustered, 64-bit quad processor SUN Solaris servers with terabytes of storage), and the features are nice too.

That being said, there are not many applications that require that level of scalability. The downside to Oracle (and MS SQL too), is that you really need to have a DBA located at each of your customers sites (or really good DBAs in your technical support department) and several internal DBAs to help your engineers during design and development of applications. I currently have 2 full time DBAs working for me in the engineering department (which is 20% of my team) and there are 2 more working in our technical support department, because Oracle is a pain to install, configure, maintain, and support. The cost is another big issue (however Oracle says: "Unbreakable and Affordable: Cut costs now with Oracle9i Database. Costs less than SQL Server and less than DB2."

On a side note: Revelation has reached several incredible milestones during the last 2 years, and has a great database and development platform. And Oracle had the largest share of the database market (the entire market) until last year when IBM purchased Informix. I think Oracle is still the second largest software company in the world (second to MS). Plus Oracle is really big overseas (where everyone just copies the full free version that Oracle has on their web site for production use). The company that I work for decided a few years ago to switch to Oracle (from MS SQL), because it had a better name and reputation internationally (obviously this was a marketing decision, not an engineering decision). I do really like Oracle, but it is overkill (we only use about 5% of the features) for our telephony and Internet applications. Oracle are 1000s of settings that must be configured perfectly to get good performance and requires 1 GB for the DB engine, and OI only has a few config parameters and requires about 10 MB.

So unless your company is already an Oracle shop with many DBAs and MS Visual Studio .NET engineers (or Java programmers – if they still exist), then you should strongly consider OI32 for new product development for the RAD, ease of maintenance, cost, and features.

If you want more specific examples of problems that I have encountered with Oracle, then please email me and I can give you more of the negative stuff on Oracle.

Tony

Tony-

I'm curious about Oracle's downsides as well- can you post them here?

Thanks-

Mike

The end of the 4th paragraph should have said:

Oracle *has* 1000s of settings that must be configured perfectly to get good performance and requires 1 GB for the DB engine, and OI only has a few config parameters and requires about 10 MB.

My point was to show that OI is easier to install, configure, and maintain – because it does not require an on-site DBA and continual performance tuning. People used to complain about having to rebuild indexes in OI once-in-a-blue-moon – you need to run continual analysis on your Oracle data, tune indexes often, maintain security, and hope that future versions/patches do not break your client apps with Oracle.

Bob ..

Very well put, indeed.

Don M.

Mike,

You bet (I did not want to get into smashing Oracle here… so I will try to be nice to Oracle at the same time). Again, I would say that I am an objective person when it comes to OI, Oracle, and MS SQL, because I used them all and have no loyalty to any of them. Overall, my opinion is that the latest and greatest OI32 is an excellent choice for 90% of the application that are being developed, and Oracle is an excellent choice for about 50% of the applications that are being developed. So there is some overlap between the two, and Harold can use these downsides and the benefits that are listed in this thread to determine if he should use OI or Oracle.

Downsides:

1. Hard to install - requires several hours, 3 full CDs, and a semi-DBA.

2. Hard to configure - look at all of these config parameters: http://otn.oracle.com/docs/products/oracle9i/doc_library/release2/nav/initora.htm.

3. Hard to maintain - requires index tuning, partition management, data management.

4. Requires client application development in MS VS6, MSVS.NET, or Java (OI has a great integrated development environment), unless you use their Oracle Forms and Reports (which are difficult to use and deploy).

5. When supporting a deployed application - most of the time your development servers do not have the same schemas as your deployed production servers, which makes supporting it difficult (there is no easy way to copy the entire database environment from production to development).

6. Cost.

7. You need to purchase third party development tools, because the tools that come with Oracle are slow (Java based) and clunky.

8. It is difficult to debug n-tiered client applications that are running on multiple boxes with stored procedures running on the server.

9. No people support at Oracle (unlike the great *people* support staff at Revelation) - only online web support (which is very good, but I like talking to people when I have a problem).

10. Sometimes difficult to maintain both the client side drivers and patches on the server.

11. When something does not work, it is hard to find root cause.

Pluses:

1. Nice scalability.

2. Nice performance under heavy loads.

3. Nice stability and reliability (when configured and maintained correctly).

4. Nice name in the marketplace.

5. Good programming support for VS.NET and Java.

6. Nice features for Internet, OO DB, security, redundancy, and other enterprise integration features.

Tony

Bob - that's a very incisive observation about the use of Oracle and Open Insight.

our internal data structures are a sort of stripped down XML

Err, actually REVG's data structures are the "stripped down" XML - the ROS*.LNK files have the single file with the dictionary in the initial frames and the data following. Like schema followed by data.

Revelation's product predated XML / HTML "elastic" data structures by over a decade. This point is often forgotten by developers anxious to emphasize their product's features instead of the reliability of the LH filing system and post-relational database.

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