Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Drop Oracle support

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3: Re: Drop Oracle support (response to 1)
Posted by Janine Ohmer on
I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand there is no doubt that supporting Oracle is causing a lot of problems. Using OpenACS with Oracle these days is basically a crap shoot - what is going to break this time? And generally speaking the person installing it is on the hook to fix any problems that come up, since we already know the person who created the problems does not have an Oracle installation.

On the other hand, in some areas Oracle is a *huge* selling point. Many universities and larger companies out there have site licenses for Oracle and trained staff to support it. These folks will be reluctant, and sometimes completely unwilling, to install Postgres. We (furfly) are doing a fairly large project for the Army Corps of Engineers, and although I tried to convince them to use Postgres, the manager told me that due to internal politics it would be much better for them to use Oracle. If this change had been seriously under discussion when we landed that contract, we probably wouldn't have it. Big-name clients like this help the entire community, not just furfly, because everyone else can point to them to give OpenACS/dotLRN credibility.

I guess it boils down to this: dropping Oracle support will increase overall code quality, and will yield a big boost in programmer convenience/productivity if the xql files are done away with. Those are good things. But IMHO the community will be limiting the toolkit's appeal to mostly the middle and low end of the potential customer base. Although I'm sure there are exceptions, there are going to be relatively few large companies and institutions that are going to be willing to bend their IT rules to accomodate our decision. This is especially true in the US, where fewer IT managers have drunk the FOSS koolaid so far.

Personally, I would prefer to see some sort of quality standard that all commits have to meet, one aspect of which would be proper Oracle support. But that is clearly not going to happen any time soon. :)