[CLUE-Tech] My transition

[Grant Johnson]

Mike Staver wrote:

>I agree, it is dangerous.  That's why I want to move us away from
>exchange as soon as possible, but our accountants just love that nifty
>little calendar they have with outlook.  I don't know of anything like
>that with a linux distro that can be combined with sendmail.  About
>visual source safe - I can definitely see us moving to CVS soon enough,
>with only 2 developers, this won't be a problem.  It's just going to be
>a pain in the you-know-what to move all of our content from VSS to CVS. 
>Then there's the toughest issue - our huge productio database.  We don't
>want to pay for something like Oracle, which in my opinion, the
>licensing is just as insane as with M$ products.  You have to pay per
>megahurtz per processor for Oracle.  That's crazy.  So, I would want to
>move to something like postgres, but it must be compatible with stored
>procs, and all of the current datatypes we use with SQL server. That
>would be a huge, huge project, and I just would like to start simple for
>now - converting my workstation over, but that's looking like it can't
>be done without a huge amount of work converting our servers over first. 
>
You will not get compatibility with your stored procedures no matter 
where you go.  MSSQL SP's are a combination of T-SQL, which only they 
and Sybase use; and VB Script, which only they use.  When non-standard 
languages with unpublished specs are used, the only answer is vendor 
lock-in.  The JDBC connection for MSSQL is not ready for prime time, and 
the ODBC is really just a pipeline to another machine (maybe even the 
machine that the DB server is running on) to an ODBC connection on that 
machine which must be Windows.