oracle distibuted database

Question

a few basic questions,

using vs08 c# and sql

• which oracle version should i download? oracle10g?

  • does it have a disgn interface like sql server mangement studio.?

  • will this distribution concept have a graphical tool which say "hi, on which servers would you like to distributed the database and on what basis?

    • using a local application i connect to its server, and try to enter or delete data not of that server. Will the oracle db mngment system transparently access other servers to get or insert data or give error?

Answer 1

Oracle 10g Express is a great starting point. You would then need the Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio package.

1. Although the database comes with a fairly basic web-based interface, you would fare much better using a proper tool as Oracle SQL Developer (it's free). It's possibly not as complete as SQL Server Management Studio in terms of what it graphically offers, but it's good enough.
2. The difference between connecting a database hosted on your local computer and one hosted 450 miles away usually boils down to correctly configure your connection strings. However, it will not ask you 'graphically'; in the C# application you will be creating, you'd have to configure that by the way of code. Oracle SQL Developer, on the other hand, will ask you kindly. :)
3. Your local application would operate over the database instances which you have set it up to do so. You could configure your application to connect to 3 (or more) different databases, and it's not that the database system will know, but that you would be the one managing the operation.

Answer 2

In reverse order:

Oracle does not do distributed in the way you (seem to) imagine. It's not Voldemort or Cassandra. It's one database per server, unless you're talking about RAC: but RAC is shared everything, so it's transparent (but way complicated).

The nearest Oracle has to SQL Server Management Studio is, I guess, Enterprise Manager. But I suspect OEM is probably not as easy to use as its MSSQL counterpart.

If you have a free choice use 11gR2. Why wouldn't you not use the latest version?

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Oracle does support one application using multiple databases. However, this is normally due existing (even legacy) databases providing some of the data for an application. You should not deliberately set out to have separate databases on multiple databases, because distributed transactions are slower, less reliable and harder to tune. Find out more.

If you want to have multiple servers for resilience or scalability then as I said before RAC (Real Application Clusters) is Oracle's solution. This is a different architecture from SQL Server's federated approach. Find out more.

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"so this link thing is support by free versions of oracle?"

There is only one free (as in free beer) version of Oracle, and that is the Express Edition (currently still 10g only). That edition does support Database Links. I suggest you read two related articles by Lewis Cunningham: one explaining about DB Links and the other on linking multiple XE instances.