September 28, 2004

Oracle DBA Wanted

The mozilla.org talkback servers are currently down. In order to resurrect them, I am told we need someone with serious Oracle DBA experience. If you are such a person, or know of someone willing to help, chofmann@mozilla.org wants to hear from you :-)

Posted by gerv at September 28, 2004 12:05 AM
Comments

Ugh... that's bad news.

Oracle DBA's are relatively hard to come by (especially if you want a good one).

Posted by: Robert Accettura at September 28, 2004 12:43 AM

holy crap, that's definitely not a good thing. tried asking on freenode yet?

Posted by: Keith Gable at September 28, 2004 03:34 AM

Damn, I don't even know what "Oracle DBA" means, but it looks serious just by the sound of it. I hope someone out there can help you guys!

Posted by: MonsterTruck at September 28, 2004 04:51 AM

MonsterTruck: DBA stands for "DataBase Administrator".

Keith: is freenode and IRC network? What channel do you suggest I ask on?

Posted by: Gerv at September 28, 2004 09:30 AM

Why not ask some of the contributing companies like Sun,IBM, Redhat etc. ? They must have Oracle knowlede maybe they can lend a hand.

Just curious, what are the Oracle problems ?
- tuning of the application ?
- Database laybout ?
- or ... ?

Posted by: henrik lynggaard at September 28, 2004 10:01 AM

How bitterly amusing. I remember something about Talkback itself not being open source (I could be wrong!), and now one of the lords of the open-source movement has a piece of its turf held hostage thanks to another non-OS platform...

Of course, Talkback is so useful that I can see why mozilla.org would use it extensively, even if it wasn't open-source. But is the same true of Oracle servers, as opposed to MySQL? I don't know, because I've never touched Oracle stuff.

Posted by: Alex Vincent at September 28, 2004 09:32 PM
How bitterly amusing. I remember something about Talkback itself not being open source (I could be wrong!),

Indeed not. An open source replacement would be welcomed with open arms. Are you offering to write one?

and now one of the lords of the open-source movement has a piece of its turf held hostage thanks to another non-OS platform...

On the contrary. We are in the same position as if Talkback had never existed - except that our app is about 100 times more stable than it would otherwise be.

But is the same true of Oracle servers, as opposed to MySQL?

You speak as if SQL DBs were completely interchangeable. If that were true in this case, do you think the Foundation would have forked out for an Oracle licence?

Posted by: Gerv at September 28, 2004 10:14 PM

If I had a contract to work on an open-source equivalent to Talkback, yeah, I'd probably do it. (I know this comes across as me sounding greedy, but I've blogged before about needing tech work.)

Unfortunately, I suspect you'd find me underqualified to be offered such a contract.

And I *know* SQL databases aren't completely interchangeable... my question was really, "Are Oracle servers that much better than MySQL for your purposes?" That was the intended context of my comment there. If the answer's yes, then it's yes, and that's all there is to it. Open-source is great, when its products are better than commercial ones. Which isn't all the time.

Posted by: Alex Vincent at September 28, 2004 10:40 PM
my question was really, "Are Oracle servers that much better than MySQL for your purposes?"

But that's not really the question :-) The question is "what does the company who supplies Talkback support?"

Open-source is great, when its products are better than commercial ones. Which isn't all the time.

A true open-source (as opposed to free software) position :-)

Posted by: Gerv at September 28, 2004 10:46 PM