Who's in charge here: Oracle or Unix?

[Brad Hines]

Let me start by saying that I basically feel like everyone else does
that applications should not mess with system files, that the
application should be subservient to the OS and not vice versa.

I think there is another side to the coin, too.  I don't know that
much about Oracle, but I know that Oracle is trying to provide a
product to people that works across systems made up of diverse
hardware and software.  If it isn't the case already, it will someday
be the case that your Sun, PC, IBM, etc can all be on the same network
running Oracle, accessing the same database.  Think about trying to
provide a consistent interface between Unix and something like Pick,
which is so different I've never wanted to try to understand it.  It's
no wonder the Oracle people chose to take over administration rather
than requesting it of the OS/administrator.  It makes sense for a big
installation where database use is the big thing.

In the sense that Oracle runs on all these different platforms and is
the one constant in a diverse computing environment, maybe it is
Oracle that is the OS and the lone Unix machine on the end of an IBM
mainframe network is the add-on.

That said, I wish they could find a different way to do it, too.

-- 
Brad Hines
Internet: brad at huey.jpl.nasa.gov
Jet Propulsion Lab, Pasadena, California