All,

IHHO Oracle has the same potential to be open as Cobol or c or Allbase. If I
choose to use areas of those products that depart from the standard, then it
is I who has made my application non-open.

I recently constructed a small application that uses ODBC, and discovered it
works on MSAccess,Oracle and SQLServer (once I had created my tables of
course).  That's what I call open, and reinforces Richard's assertion that
"The SQL standard is the only thing meaningfully open."

I'd like to see whether it works on Image/SQL also, so if Birket's listening
I'd be happy to receive my free copy of his ODBC driver:)   - I'd be
delighted to post results, if Birket's up to it:)

Mike Whiteley
SMA, Houston TX


-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
Behalf Of Joseph Rosenblatt
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2000 12:48 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Quote of the week


Richard Gambrell wrote:

Sorry, but Oracle is *not* an Open system by any reasonable definition!

I can forgive those that forget NT is proprietary, but Oracle definitely is.

Image/sql also conforms to SQL standards, even if a tad older than Oracle's
conformance. The SQL standard is the only thing meaningfully open.

Richard

I have nothing to add to this statement, I just thought it was worth
rereading.

Joseph