IMPLEMETING AND OPERATING APPLICATIONS ON ORACLE SOFTWARE

Platform Selection and Development Approach

CONTENTS
1. Introduction 2. Oracle Software 3. Oracle and Operating Systems (Windows, Unix, Linux) 4. Oracle Development Platform & Tools 5. Conclusion

Introduction Oracle has grown from its humble beginnings as one of a number of databases available in the 1970s to the overwhelming market leader of today. In its early days, Oracle Corporation was known as an aggressive sales and promotion organization. Over the years, the Oracle database has grown in depth and quality, and its technical capabilities now match its early hype. With the Oracle8i, Oracle9i and 10g releases, Oracle has added more power and features to its already solid base. In 1983, the developers of Oracle made a critical decision to create a portable version of Oracle (Version 3) that ran not only on Digital VAX/VMS systems, but also on UNIX and other platforms. By 1985, Oracle claimed the ability to run on more than 30 platforms (it runs on more than 70 today). Some of these platforms are historical ambitions today, but others remain in use. (In addition to VMS, early operating systems supported by Oracle included IBM MVS, DEC Ultrix, HP/UX, IBM AIX, and Sun's Solaris version of Unix.) Oracle was able to leverage and accelerate the growth of minicomputers and UNIX servers in the 1980s. Today, Oracle leverages its portability on Microsoft Windows and Linux to capture a significant market share on these more recent platforms. In addition to multiple platform support, other core Oracle messages from the mid-1980s still hold true today, including complementary software development and decision support tools, ANSI standard SQL and portability across platforms, and connectivity over standard networks. Since then, the database deployment model has evolved from dedicated database application servers to client/server to Internet

computing implemented with PCs and thin clients accessing database applications via browsers. Oracle Software Oracle offers a long list of products encompassing every levels of an IT infrastructure, the database and application servers being the dominant ones in their respective markets. Database server, Application server, ERP applications, Portal, Content Management, Development tools etc categories of products that Oracle offers but the main focus of this paper will be the database server and development tools. Oracle has the lions share of the global database market with a figure of 41%. This shows the rock solid strength of the software for mission critical purposes. In addition to being a dominant player in the database market, Oracles software has several unique features which differentiate it from other products. 1. Oracle is the first relational database management system 2. Oracle is supported on almost all popular operating systems and platforms 3. Oracle works on all known hardware architectures 4. Oracle provides tools for facilitating software development on the database/application server. 5. It has proven to be dependable and stable for large scale mission critical applications. 6. Oracle supports a number of technologies for software development (Java, C, PL/SQL, .NET)

Oracle and Operating Systems As stated earlier, Oracle is supported on almost all commercial and popular operating systems including various flavors of UNIX (HP/UX, AIX, SCO, BSD, Solaris, True64, etc), Windows (9x, NT, 2000, XP, 2003), Linux (RedHat, SuSe) and also on VAX/VMS systems. Although there are minor variations on how Oracle behaves on different platforms, most features are similar irrespective of OS differences. Installation, configuration and management of the Oracle database, to a greater extent, are identical on different platforms. Oracle Development Platform & Tools Oracle offers a very mature environment platform for application development. JDeveloper: is an integrated development environment (IDE) for building applications and Web services using the latest industry standards for Java, XML, and SQL. Oracle JDeveloper supports the complete development life cycle with integrated features for modeling, coding, debugging, testing, profiling, tuning, and deploying applications. Oracle Reports: is a powerful Enterprise Reporting tool to build and publish high quality, dynamically generated Web reports. Through data-driven tables of contents, hyperlinks, and drill-down chart hyperlinks, Oracle Reports provides users with an easy route to the information they require. Oracle Forms Service & Forms Developer: OracleAS Forms Services is an application server and associated services that are optimized for deploying Oracle9i Forms applications on the Web. OracleAS Forms Services delivers out-of-the-box functionality and native services to ensure

that Oracle Forms applications automatically scale and perform over any network. OracleAS Forms Services enables rich, extensible Java clients that are optimized for the Web. OracleAS Forms Services built-in services include transaction management, record caching, record locking, and exception handling. OracleAS Forms Services built-in services provide a critical infrastructure that developers would otherwise have to code and re-code by hand many times throughout all parts of your application. With Oracle9i Forms Developer, business application developers quickly build, in a declarative RAD environment, comprehensive Java client applications that are optimized for the Internet without writing any Java code. These Java client applications are rich, Web-deployed applications available on demand for rapid processing of large amounts of data and rapid completion of complex calculations, analysis, and transactions. In addition to these, the Oracle platform supports several technologies for application development including C, PL/SQL, Perl, PHP, .NET etc. There are also several third party tools for facilitating development. Among the third party products some worth mentioning here include, TOAD, DreamCoder, OraEdit, SqlAnywhere and SqlWays.

Conclusion From what have been discussed earlier in this paper, we can confidently say that Oracle provides a full set of products and technologies for designing, implementing and operating the most demanding internet age applications. But all this flexibility and scalability comes at a cost. In order to be successful on implementing and operating a successful application on the Oracle platform one needs to be equipped with a couple of skills. 1. Since Oracles products are supported on several Operating Systems, one needs to have a good understanding of at least the most widely used ones which are Unix/Linux and Windows. 2. In order to be able to develop industry standard applications, developers and DBAs need to be acquainted with at least the some of the technologies supported by the platform (Java, .NET, SQL, PL/SQL) 3. A good understanding of RDBM system techniques. 4. A good understanding of networking and Internet technologies and standards including, but not limited to; TCP/IP, Directory Service (NIS/NIS+,DNS, AD, LDAP) 5. And also the skill required to user several tools for manipulating the Oracle product. Having mentioned about the required skill for implementing the Oracle platform, lets consider the environments in which the product is being used in the industry I. Single Environment: This is a situation where the Oracle products are implemented and used on a single Operating System environment. The Oracle product (Database or Application Server) is

implemented and operated on a single platform, either Windows or Unix/Linux, and a single development tool is usually used. II. Heterogeneous Environments: This is where several Operating Systems are used for implementing Oracles products. For example a company which uses HP/UX as its main platform with NIS+ or LDAP directory structure and also implementing its corporate database on the same platform while having several Windows Servers serving as middle tier running Oracle9iAS. Experience has shown that the heterogeneous environment prevails in real world situations with a much larger degree than the single platform one. This is not an accident rather a number of underlying factory account for this situation, which includes The legendry reliability of Unix platforms makes them number one choice for large data centers. Application development on the Windows platform is by far more developed and the availability of tools to assist it is miles away from that of Unix/Linux. The dominance of Windows on the desktop necessitates a middle tier for serving the clients for authentication, providing Windows specific services like MSMQ, COM, Active Directory etc. Even the most predominantly Unix environments it is becoming a common practice to see a Windows box. For longer time the development tool of choice for implementing applications has been Java for its platform independence and deep integration with the Oracles products. Recent releases have added first class support for other technologies including PHP and .NET. For

example Oracle 10g (the current release) incorporates an optimized and managed provider for the .NET framework and embedding the CLR within the database is expected to be included in Release 2. Starting with Oracle 9i AS support for PHP has been added. With the advent of Web Services the issue of platform seems dwindling since the very concept of Web Services is to allow disparate systems on different platforms implemented in different languages/technologies work together seamlessly. As a final note we can have the following three points: I. Implement the Oracle Database on a Unix box. This implies using Unix as a backbone for the infrastructure. Of all the flavors of Unix, I recommend Solaris as the platform of choice due to the fact that it is the most developed and advanced Unix platform to date regarding scalability, security and hardware support. Plus it features seamless integration with Windows technologies and above all it is offered for $0.00 and the source code is also available. II. Add Windows boxes for different services like application servers (running either J2EE or .NET based services), web, proxy, mail etc. III. Use different approach from that of Oracles for data entry and reporting. Rather than using Oracle Forms for data entry use ASP.NET, JSP/JSF, PHP (for web apps) or .NET based smart clients for desktop apps. This will give designers and developers flexibility and choice in addition to leveraging available skill set and resources.