[Original snipped, I trust the thread is fresh enough to avoid any
ambiguity]

I agree with your color TV/Xerox machine/other electronics simile
completely.  Unix in general and Oracle in particular are way on down
there on the reliable, self-sufficient scale, and the demand for people
to take care of their maintenance come at a high price.

Ironically, I find myself currently in Atlanta attending an advanced
Cisco router class, so perhaps I'm only being blasphemous about those
areas where I do not yet posess a degree of expertise.  Cisco has
approximately 80% of the internet router market share, yet the most
coveted certification level, the CCIE (Cisco Certified Internet
Engineer) has been bestowed on less than 4000 people worldwide.  But
fortunately, you don't have to be a CCIE to setup a router.

This is not true in general of unix; I've shot myself in the foot twice
so far (more are probably yet to come) with the innocent typo of
cleaning up after an install with 'rm *>o' instead of 'rm *.o'.  It is
even less true of Oracle and other beasties which are even less tolerant
and unless you're running it on NT, run the same risks as Oracle while
you're trying to maintain it.

Now granted, you *could* shoot yourself in the foot with MPE in the
posix shell in the same manner, which is something Wirt is horrified
to see (recall the rm/mv active files thread last week); but you would
have to try really hard to do this in the MPE CI, and even then you
would get access violations on files in use to at least alert you to
your mistake.

The fact remains that a departmental secretary can, after a couple days
of introduction, operate a 3000 server in day to day use quite well, I'm
sure many of you can cite examples (no need for testimonials unless
someone questions that statement).  You can't do that with a unix box.
You darn sure can't do that with an Oracle database.  There is a
constant need to reorganize your tables, de-fragment your tablespaces,
process your archive logs, alter your rollback segments as batch
processes get "intensive", and the list goes on.  You need a high priced
highly trained professional to do this for you.

The 3000 and Image are prime examples of how to do something right.  A
previous post lamented the fact that they could not "drop Image/SQL
under their existing applications".  Well, if your only tool is a
hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>