[log in to unmask] wrote:

> While I dare not presume upon your time, I (and, I'm sure, others)
> would certainly appreciate any highlights from your Oracle class
> that you care to post.

In order to do this, I must first admit nearly complete ignorance of
a *whole* lot of things, but I'll swallow my ego to provide a long-time
hard-core MPE fanatic being thrust into this "brave new world" (sic).

First off, no slights intended to unix, HPUX, Oracle, SCT, or anybody
or anything else; just my informal observations after a couple of weeks
in a relatively (in some cases totally) new environment.

I must first confess to a very limited knowledge of unix (well, after
some years with MPE posix fiddling and my stint at Xavier with Richard
on their 9000, I did pick up some basics).  But no formal training, and
no onsite peers to network with, just trial and error, with a lot of
frustration.

I will next confess to being clueless as to any relational database
experience beyond following Denys' "cookbook" for hooking up Image/SQL
and playing with MS/Query a bit (technically not SQL).  No Allbase
either, just Image.

UTC has committed to SCT Banner software to replace the bulk of our
legacy Cobol/Image software to a client/server Oracle environment, with
our intent to implement this on HPUX (the strongest unix experience I
have, not that it is that significant).  We have arranged with HP for
the use of a K370/400 (one *hell* of a machine for a shop currently
running on a 960).  It arrived two weeks ago, preloaded (Instant
Ignition) with 10.20.  I expected a uniprocessor machine.  At first
bootup you can imagine my surprise to find four.  I quickly ran a
backup, and was shocked to find ~35,000 files in this *virgin* system.

SCT installed software last week.  Other than setting up three
filesystems for their use, I was more or less a bystander for their
installation efforts until the last day when we were instructed how to
start/stop the various Oracle instances and the client listener.  Still
no knowledge of any details nor clue how to try and find them.

Basic Oracle tools class is this week, we've done SQL*Plus and will be
doing SQL*Loader and some other tools next week.  I find their naming
conventions cryptic (but I guess that is a personal opinion) and SQL to
be rather picky and verbose in contrast to Query (e.g., adding an entry)
but some constructs are quite powerful (at the risk of being extremely
inefficient depending on how you order things).

It has been "awkward" for me, but not as bad (overall) as I thought.
Other staff members with no unix experience were even more confused
outside of the SQL*Plus application.  We brought in some of the more
power users from the end-user areas for training in the inquiry tasks,
but today we advanced to inserts, replace, etc.  In one lab exercise we
were to add a row to two tables, and later remove them.  The person
sitting next to me did the remove *without a WHERE clause* on two tables
and was about to COMMIT before I suggested that "You REALLY don't want
to do that..."

I don't think we'll allow more than read access at the SQL level to end
users in the future :-)  The "security" class is next week.

So big deal, I can do some Oracle queries.  There's a long way to go
still and thus far I'm overall quite stressed supposedly being
responsible for managing that which I have only a casual understanding.
The stress level was considerably less with the familiar and reliable
MPE/Image application, but I'm still trying to stay optimistic.

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>
HP3000 Administrator/Image DBA
HP9000 Administrator/Oracle DBA (? say what ?) in training