This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz
by David Rolfe.
Original Post: Lots of people still use Oracle 8i, 57% on 9.2...
Feed Title: OrindaBlog - Orinda Software's Corporate Blog
Feed URL: http://www.jroller.com/rss/orindasoft
Feed Description: We're in the business of creating products that make it easier to work with Oracle, Java and JDBC. We want this blog to be something more than a stream of product-related propaganda - our intention is two-thirds of the content will be of general relevance to people who work with Oracle, Java and PL/SQL. Entries to this blog will be made as and when we have information that we think our readers would be interested in.
When we started Orinda two years ago we made a conscious decision to support every version of Oracle we could, instead of doing the easy thing and only supporting the latest and greatest ones. Supporting 6 different versions turned out to be a lot of work, but it turns out that it was the right call. When it comes to JDBC there are real differences between the versions, especially when it comes to LOBS. Beware of anyone who tries to tell you that a generic solution will work in this case.
What we weren't expecting was the pie chart below. Fully 30% of our users are still on the various 8i releases. The other surprise is how people aren't switching to 10g as fast as you'd expect.
What should we make of this? 8i is good enough for most purposes, and still better than many non-Oracle databases. It takes far more time and energy, not to mention money, to switch Oracle versions than to switch Java versions. The low-ish number on 9.0.1 is not surprising, as experienced Oracle hands are reluctant to embrace the first release of any new Oracle version. This might also explain the slowness to adopt 10g and there may well be an upgrade stampede when 10.2 comes out and is perceived as 'safe' by decison makers. Ultimately Oracle are a victim of their own success in that many existing Oracle users lack a compelling reason to upgrade other than Oracle's increasing reluctance to provide support.
From a Java perspective the 9i and 10g JDBC drivers are significantly better, as they make it possble to create BLOBS and CLOBS without having to go through the INSERT, SELECT-FOR-UPDATE, UPDATE cycle that was required previously. We're currently finalizing a new version of our product that creates Java for Web Services and we won't be supporting creation of BLOBS and CLOBS on 8i via single method calls.
We would recommend that anyone creating a new system from scratch use 10g - even if you don't need all the new features you'll have to upgrade to it sooner or later...
Previous Topic
