Oracle is breaking record speeds in releasing new products, changing names of existing products and releasing new versions of current products. It has been challenging for technologists to keep track of the changes.  The constant flux of changes has caused some people confusion in knowing the purpose, functionality, and role of each product.  This confusion may lead some people to believe that similar Oracle products compete against each other.

The purpose of this article/presentation is to touch base with Oracle Development Products/Tools; discuss the functionality of each product; discuss the similarities and migration utilities between pro ducts; and to discuss developing business applications using one or a combination of these development tools from Oracle.  This article/presentation explains Oracle’s future direction on some of the products and discusses the licensing/server model that Oracle has developed, the introduction of 9iAS.

Oracle Servers, Languages and Development Tools:

Oracle Servers:

At a higher-level, Oracle has two products:  Read the rest of this entry

If you have multiple instances on a single machine, you need to have a way to switch from one instance to another. I have seen many systems set up where this is done manually, rather than through the scripts provided by Oracle. I would strongly suggest that you use Oracle’s scripts. Most manual processes that I have seen assume that there is only one version of oracle, and maybe even only one instance on a machine. In those cases, adding a new version or a new instance can cause problems.

VMS

You switch to a new Oracle instance by running the orauser.com script that was built for that instance when it was created. Although this script takes care of everything for you, you first have to know where it is. If you had Oracle 7.3 installed under the DISK01:[ORACLE73] directory, the orauser script for the ABC instance would be: DISK01:[ORACLE73.DB_ABC]ORAUSER_ABC.COM.

Users would point to the ABC instance by running that script.

$ @ DISK01:[ORACLE73.DB_ABC]ORAUSER_ABC.COM

The script defines logical names to point to the various Oracle directories, and defines symbols so that you can run the Oracle programs, such as sqlplus.

If you want to point to another instance, you would need to locate and run the orauser.com script for that instance.

UNIX

Oracle on UNIX provides a single script that allows you to switch from one instance to another. Actually, there are 2 scripts; one for csh users and one for ksh users. These scripts look in the oratab file to find the correct value for $ORACLE_HOME for the instance, then set environment variables to correctly configure your environment.

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Oracle Designer offers substantial new configuration management capabilities utilizing the Oracle Repository.  This presentation will provide an overview of the new configuration management functionality and how it can best be utilized to provide a robust application development environment.

One of the primary benefits of using Oracle Designer is the ability to share existing knowledge between applications.  However when new functionality needs to be added to the repository and existing applications have already been defined serious configuration management issues can arise.  What used to work may suddenly exhibit new and unintended features.  A well planned configuration management plan coupled with the new features of Designer 6i can help to alleviate most of the problems associated with revisions and derivations of applications.

Configuration Management coordinates the resolution of software development issues by identifying and controlling the problems that confront software development teams.  Maintaining multiple incremental releases of software inevitably causes them to diverge from each other meaning that even with the best of intentions a seemingly identical change made to two versions of an application many times result in two different results.  Over time the discrepancy between versions grows wider as new features are introduced that may not be included in the original version.  Without control over existing releases with their bug fixes and new release that introduce added functionality the ability to rebuild prior versions becomes difficult or impossible.   Manually maintaining the identification and maintenance of existing versions becomes increasingly difficult as new versions are released.  As additional versions are introduced it is increasingly likely that a modification will not be propagated or retrofitted which may introduce bugs or result in a loss of functionality.

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