[Zope-DB] Interested in continued Oracle support in Zope?

[Dario Lopez-Kästen]

Charlie Clark wrote:

> We'd be very interested to know what people's experience with mxODBC and 
> Oracle are and, of course, interested in improving things where possible. 
> Our understanding is that the standard Un*x Oracle ODBC isn't up to much so 
> third party drivers are required. When connecting to Oracle on Windows it's 
> possible for the drivers to work like native ones.

We only use Linux or Solaris in production for our HA services. We have 
a few windows servers, but those are not used for any of the sites that 
need to access or serve Oracle-based data.

 From my perspective, there is a problem in that in order to use ODBC on 
Linux (which we are moving towards for most of our web-apps), I need to 
a) use unixODBC and b) purchase a linux ODBC driver from EasySoft.

This is a cost of about 3000 USD for the whole site (we use several 
machines). Then we have to purchase a similar site license for mxODBC.

Compare this to the fact that we can switch to Java (which would get a 
big Hurrah! from some of the more Buzz-word compliant managers) or PHP, 
which is also favored here.

So, from my own perspective,, it would be way smoother if there was a 
native Python driver for Oracle.

I am not questioning mxODBC or anything, I am just pointing out that the 
decision to use or not use mxODBC is not a simple one.

If it just was about the money, i think it would be no problems, but 
spending almost 4000 dollars (including licenses for mxODBC) and STILL 
having to rely on the non-commercial platform that is unixODBC, sort of 
negates the whole point of spending money on commercially supported 
software.

And this very fact, may lead to choosing other platforms than Zope for 
apps that have to use Oracle. I just cannot justify the problems we are 
having with the Oracle drivers for python. I can only try to maske them 
so much, but as it is now, I may just have to consider Java, Perl or PHP 
based appservers instead.

Something that I do not wish to happen, of course.

/dario
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Dario Lopez-Kästen, IT Systems & Services Chalmers University of Tech.