Re: pgSQL deployment

Lily Anne,

Did you contact any of the companies whose names I sent you? How did they
respond?

> Would you guys have any white paper or any documents that lists how big
> companies handled their deployment, e.g.

Nope. Would be nice to have, though.

> (1) is it advisable to give
> training classes to application development team,

Yes. This is advisable for *any* technology migration of any kind.

>if yes, how could we
> get these services and who should we contact?;

Contact the companies I mentioned. If they can't help you, e-mail me
directly and I'll hook you up with a PostgreSQL contributor who does
training.

(2) do you have a "cheat
> sheet" of all of the essential things needed to quickly port from Oracle
> to pgSQL?;

Nope. Another thing that would be terrific to have. Partly, this depends
on what version of Oracle you're using and what Oracle features, middleware,
and development style you have.

For example:
1) What version of Oracle are you using?
2) What is your middleware platform? Interface code?
3) Are your database calls confined to well-defined libraries/functions or are
they intermixed with other code?
4) How complex is the SQL you use? Could you give examples of a few
"complex" queries from your application?
5) Are you using any of Oracle's "enterprise" features, such as table
partitioning, clustering, query result caching, or replication?
6) Can your developers estimate how much non-standard-SQL they use, containing
Oracle-specific syntax? Examples include "+" for outer joins and "IS
CONNECTED BY".
7) How large is your database, in records in the main tables, and in GB?

> (3) how would the information be disseminated to all of the
> other parties involved (i.e., QA, networking, operations)?; (4) what are
> the best practices for setting up the dev, qa test, and production
> environments; etc.

These things are no different regardless of what you're migrating to. Any
systems analyst consultant should be able to tackle these issues.

> Maybe pgSQL commercial vendors would do this for a corporation for a fee
> but if you know of anything that's available that's posted for free,
> that'll be great!

Joe sent you some links. I don't think you'll get anything any more in=depth
for free, not for any of the databases you're evaluating. If IBM or
Microsoft are giving you migration plans for "free", it's becuase they plan
to charge you $150,000 for licenses later on.

--
-Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco