Hi
 Please see inline

Josh Berkus wrote:
> Sriram,
>
>>  I am currently involved with WebStack project in OpenSolaris and 
>> would like to add more extensions for recently integrated PHP so that 
>> programmers can use our platform for development / production 
>> purposes. Based on the some of the feedback we received from some 
>> customers (outside Sun),  it seems that we need to more database 
>> support within PHP and this requires databases client libraries like 
>> Free TSD , Oracle Instant Client and unixODBC to pre-exist on the 
>> system.
>
> In principle I'm in favor of more drivers.  However, I have a few 
> questions:
>
> What's the licensing on the Oracle client?  We can't necessarily just 
> include proprietary SW on Opensolaris.
>
Here is the licensing agreement
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/popup-license/instant_client_lic.html

Well, a quick glance seems to suggest that our lawyers probably won't 
allow us to bundle these libraries within Open Solaris. Still, I would 
like to hear from you experts and see if this is feasible to bundle 
within OpenSolaris in one form or the other.
> FreeTDS is a bit beta-quality, so it would require some QA, and 
> probably debugging for Solaris, first.  Who's asking for this?  Are 
> there really a lot of users who have a DB server on Windows and a web 
> server on Solaris?
>
My focus is towards getting  PHP developers choose SXDE as their 
development platform and still be able to work with a variety of 
database that typically resides in corporate environment. Also, I am 
being told that customers like Joyent does use MSSQL in their environment.
> unixODBC/iODBC keeps coming up as an issue, but we're not seeing 
> actual user requests.  Do you have users with a need for it?  That 
> could affect the priority.
>
Providing a ODBC database manager provides lot of flexibility to upstack 
components like PHP so that programmers are able to hook up various 
databases. IMO, providing this support is very developer friendly but I 
don't hae any concrete data to tell you that customers do use a ODBC 
manager in production environment.  Frankly speaking, Oracle Instant 
Client and Free TDS would be lot more useful - at least with respect to 
a PHP programmer using Open Solaris.

Hope this helps
Sriram

Reply via email to