Oracle (not Rdb) database

[Whittall, Conrad]

Hi Mike,

I see that Blue just beat me to it...

Yes, PowerHouse on OpenVMS can access Oracle 7, 8 and 8i databases...and can
actually do so regardless of where the database is actually hosted (courtesy
of Oracle SQL*Net, for Oracle 7, or Net8, for Oracle 8/8i).

In fact, this is just the sort of thing that Margaret at MFI in the UK was
talking about earlier...as they now have Oracle 8i running on a Tru64 box,
but their PowerHouse applications are still running on OpenVMS and are
accessing their Tru64-hosted Oracle database.

As Blue mentioned, you need to be running one of the PowerHouse Series 8
releases on OpenVMS in order to get the Oracle support. Version 8.20 is the
currently shipping Series 8 release for OpenVMS, but version 8.30 is
currently in first round field testing and will become the recommended
upgrade path for all of our OpenVMS customers when it becomes available
later this year...as it does contain PHD data dictionaries and a whole raft
of the other "OpenVMS-specific" features that we have ported into Series 8
from version 7.10. (Just to remind Bill, the "VMSisms" weren't removed from
Series 8...they were never there to start with as Series 8 started life on
UNIX and MPE/iX.)

Best regards,
Conrad

Conrad Whittall
Marketing Manager, Application Development Tools
Cognos Incorporated, 3755 Riverside Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, K1G 4K9, Canada

Developer productivity never goes out of style!

For details of the Cognos PowerHouse family of high-productivity
development tools for Web, Windows and terminal-based business
applications, and to request your own free copy of our new product
demo CD, simply click here http://www.cognos.com/powerhouse.


-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Chalenburg [mailto:chalenburg@Harding.edu]
Sent: Thursday 21 June 2001 12:07
To: powerh-l@lists.swau.edu
Subject: Oracle (not Rdb) database


Good morning,

Given the current thread on Rdb, I'd like to get advice on a separate but
related topic.

We are running an Alpha cluster with VMS 7.2-1 (soon to be 7.3) and
Powerhouse 7.10F2.  After years of home grown software, about 95% in
Powerhouse, we are moving to a 3rd party vendor for all of our applications.
We are down to two vendors and the similarity is that they both run on
Oracle 8.1.7 (not Rdb).  We intend to run the database server portion on the
VMS cluster.

There are a few of our applications that will not be replaced by the 3rd
party product.  Also it would be very helpful to be able to modify some of
our applications to look at the Oracle database.  Is any of this feasible?
What kinds of pitfalls are there?  I had understood that we would be able to
use Powerhouse to access the Oracle database.  Is that correct?

Thanks for your help.

Mike

|------------------------------------------------------------|
| Mike Chalenburg         |  Harding University              |
| chalenburg@harding.edu  |  Information Technology Services |
| 501-279-4041            |  Manager, MIS                    |
|------------------------------------------------------------|
        The opinions expressed are those of the writer
       and not necessarily those of Harding University.