Oracle for Mac
One of the biggest issues stopping Mac from being accepted in the enterprise was its inability to run Oracle. While databases like MySQL and ProgressSQL are very good and popular for personal users and for specialized applications, Oracle has become the standard in the corporate market. For instance, we wanted to recently port an application database to MySQL, however, there are a number of triggers and PL/SQL (which is really part of the application logic) which would not port properly to a non-Oracle database. Luckily, Oracle offers non-commercial user databases for free download off the internet. A few of our complaints against Oracle are:
- Oracle is touted for handling massive volumes, however many test databases do not need this functionality or overhead, yet need to run Oracle for other compatibility reasons (as those outlined above)
- Oracle SQL is nowhere near as direct as SQL for MySQL or other alternatives
However, as we said, many business apps are written to only work on Oracle. However, Oracle is ported to the Mac in version Oracle 10.2. Apache comes standard on OS X, Cygwin (the UNIX emulator) should not need to be installed because UNIX is the and agnostic browsers (they don’t care what operating system they run on) like Safari and Firefox and Opera allow you to being able to bring corporate apps to run on OS X natively.
The difficulty is that there are configuration changes that come with porting to OS X and this means that you can not simply follow the installation manual, but need to be technical enough to essentiallly figure out the install yourself. We will be testing the porting of an Oracle-Tomcat-Cygwin install to Mac running on Oracle and will document our problems and successes on this blog in future posts.
See these link for details.
http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/macos/index.html
http://www.oreilly.com/pub/ct/49
http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html
