Oracle Database Access

whew.. Oracle is a beast my friend - it practically has it''s own gravitational field! I had to manage an Oracle project a year or so ago and it was my first real taste of Oracle. I bought a book called "Oracle 8i for Linux Starter Kit" which was a big help but I had previously dealt with other relational databases.

If it''s possible I would recommend scaling your solution down or trying to use a different back end. If Oracle is a must then I would seek some close company that knows how to write schemas and get everything connected. Forget the clustering stuff altogether as it is next to impossible to get working.

Good Luck -

Dan-0

ADO.Net is the latest data access API from MS - works with Oracle, MS SQL, Access, etc...

Oracle level databases are not a trivial thing to operate - and they tend to break stuff every time they release a new client, that''s been my experience anyway.

We actually use a citrix server that people connect to, and use that to connect to the oracle DB; this way they can configure the citrix host correctly and not worry about the true clients. I thought it was ridiculous, but it does ''just work'' this way.

Oracle is definitely a very huge topic, its grown to be a lot more than a simple database. Almost every programming language and OS combination has custom APIs and drivers for accessing Oracle DBs, plus a very very large and bewildering array of middleware When you''re learning Oracle, try to keep the Oracle server and you client on the same OS and machine/processor type if possible. If you mix and match, it becomes very evil, especially if you choose something other than Linux/Windows on Intel x86.

Why language are you hoping to access the Oracle DB from? Accessing an Oracle DB from Visual Basic or Java (JDBC) is a good place to start - in VB it is especially simple and easy to learn, there are lots of books out there on this. I would guess that about 70% or more of the VB applications out there in use today are database frontends/interfaces. Accessing the database from MFC/VC++ isn''t that hard either... I''m not sure what APIs there are for Linux and C++ and how hard they are to use.

If you haven''t already, at some point you will probably have to learn SQL if you want to do more than the absolute basics. As long as you don''t start jumping into the extensions like PL/SQL and TransactSQL, SQL is pretty much a no-brainer and very easy for programmers to pick up. Most introductory books on Java and VB database programming teach you the basics of SQL anyways.