Thrilling Application Server 10g
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For her part, Kelly Cox, an IOUG board member, has been putting Oracle Application Server 10g through its paces. Cox said shes "thrilled" with the new version, which she installed in a fraction of the time shes spent on prior releases.
"I was able to complete the install in about 5 hours, which is unheard of in prior releases," she said. "Ive never completed an install in less than two or three days."
Cox, a consultant, said that the small to medium-sized businesses that form her client base will benefit both from the ease of installation and the vastly improved documentation with which 10g ships. Documentation in previous releases seemed to assume that a given user is familiar with Oracle prompts and has a general, pre-existing sense of the product, Cox said.
"For people who are new to the Oracle world, it hasnt been that easy to contend with," she said. "But Application Server 10g documentation really explains concepts well. It doesnt let you get into the installation part before reviewing what youre doing, and thats just wonderful."
In addition, Application Server organization has been streamlined, Cox said, and offers much more flexibility. She offered one example: In 9i Release 2, a repository of database structures that support Application Server had to be installed into the applications own database and was very difficult to install into a customers own database.
Unfortunately, putting the metadata repository into their own database is exactly what most customers want, since its much easier to access ones own data to display in a portal, for example.
Another reason a customer might want to install the metadata repository into another database is when deploying a clustered or grid environment. In such a case, metadata must be stored in whatever database has already been configured, Cox said.
With 10g, the choice of putting the repository into an external database is built-in and documented. Thats important not only because its easier to work with your own database but also because most shops have a defined set of databases that their DBAs are in charge of administering. Being powerless against having a new database introduced was not something such shops appreciated, to put it mildly.
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