The keyboard of Bob Dew emitted at some point in time:
> John Grant wrote:
> > The coursework is fairly straight forward, but each of the students needs
> > to create their own databases, tables, and queries.
>
> > The Oracle sales people about had a heart attack when I told them
> > I wanted 40 floating "server" licenses.
>
> No doubt. In the database arena, client/server is the only way to go.
> Students can create and administer their own separate databases from
> individual workstations via remote calls to a central server. A
> plethora of DBMS tools are around to support this.
>
> I don't see an advantage of requiring local, individual servers for
> teaching purposes. The database itself is usually best implemented on a
> non-UFS file system, anyway, for efficiency and performance reasons.
WHow on earth do you propose to teach setting up a database server unless
the trainees are actually doing it?
> We once investigated using AFS for a database application (a campus-wide
> help desk system), mostly for the convince of having a built-in backup &
> recovery system and unlimited disk space, but concluded that AFS only
> complicated an otherwise efficient system. We instead use a single
> database engine (Sybase) with dedicated mirrored disks, and allow
> client/server access from Unix hosts, PCs and Macs via a variety of
> TCP/IP based tools, including the Web.
So John, there you are, all you need now is 40 workstations with non-Unix
file systems, dedicated mirrored disks and a dedicated Sybase engine on
each - sheesh.
Thomas
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