Chapter 1. Oracle Meets Open Source
The combination of Oracle Corporation and open source software may appear to be an unlikely pairing. What could Oracle, with its history of ruthless competition, intense marketing, and cutthroat corporate life, have to do with the collaborative, altruistic, and apparently anti-corporate world of open source?
The answer, surprisingly, is quite a lot. In recent years, the gospel of the open source movement has spread far and wide, reaching even the corporate corridors and product lines of organizations like Oracle Corporation. Consider the following recent developments:
Oracle8i has been officially ported to the freely available Linux operating system.
The open source Apache web server is now distributed as part of the Oracle Internet Application Server (iAS).
The open source Perl, Tcl, and Python scripting languages all provide modules supporting connections to Oracle databases.
The Oratcl application, an open source program built on the Tcl scripting language, is now distributed as part of the Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) product.
Dozens of excellent applications written by open source developers—Orac, Oddis, Karma, Oracletool, OraSnap, Big Brother, jDBA, GNOME-db, and many more—give Oracle database administrators and developers new tools for managing their databases and building new applications. And if one of these tools doesn’t do exactly what’s needed in a specific environment, the source code can be modified without restriction.
In our ...