In trying to find a web hosting company that offers Oracle databases, I ran up short.
If there are no such package options, is it acceptable to find a place that JUST offers Oracle DB hosting and a separate web hosting account through a different company?
In terms bandwidth amounts, say I find a nice web hosting package that offers 3000 GB of transfer a month. Would a moderate sized database eat through that quickly with thousands of queries a day? How about hundreds of thousands? I don’t think sites that offer free database hosting with the package(MySQL or PostgreSQL accounts for instance) count the database transfers (being local) as bandwidth used, right?
Local database traffic does not count towards your bandwidth total.
Is there a particular reason you need Oracle? It’s overkill for a lot of applications, but if you’re designing something huge then you’ll probably want to go with a managed server (where they design and set up a dedicated server or servers for you) or colocation (where you build your own hardware and lug it down to the data center and install it in your own rack.)
For anything small-to-medium sized, the free database options are often sufficient. But it’s impossible to tell without more information about what you’re trying to do.
I googled “oracle hosting” and got a bunch of hits. The first one I clicked on offered Oracle + Apache/Tomcat/Jboss.
Admittedly, they’re a heckuva lot more expensive than the usual MySQL/Postgres packages, but that’s Oracle for you.
I find it a little odd that you’d even be able to find a retail-level host that’d run Oracle but not Apache or something. The security and WAN management would be a nightmare, and performance would probably suck, especially in the 100k tps range.
Regarding your other questions:
The amount of transfer you use is entirely dependent on the size of your results. If your average query returns 100KB, you “only” get 30,000,000 of those a month at 3TB.
No LAMP host I’ve ever dealt with counts hits to localhost toward your transfer total. Hell, some of them don’t even bother to count DB space in your disk calculations.
I searched for “Web hosting Oracle,” “Oracle web hosting”, etc and didn’t get much. I didn’t every try just “Oracle Hosting.”
The reason I would like to have Oracle is for practice and something to practice. I would like to do web development, PHP, oracle, mysql, etc. I currently have no experience with ASP, JSP or .NET and would like some experience with a decent sized project with oracle. I have several ideas and working with oracle would look good on my resume, I think. (I am currently a student, but I graduate in a year or so) I don’t think I “need” Oracle, just would be willing to pay 10-20 dollars a month to get some experience and have some sort of portfolio to point to.
I found several sites that just “seemed” to offer Oracle database hosting. I didn’t look too deep, it just seemed from their intro pages that DB hosting was their primary thing. I know you an connect to a remote database in some instances, I just wasn’t sure how common it is.
I am by no means an expert, and please take this with a grain of salt. No offense intended. Learning new skills is good. I understand that it is difficult to get real world experience without getting in the door, and having these things on your resume just may get you in the door at a big company where they use these things.
But from the point of view of a potential employer, I would rather see that you know the appropriate tool for the job. Sure, your project will demonstrate proficiency with a complicated database/engine, but when it comes down to it, if that same project could have been completed more efficiently with LAMP or SQLServer/ASP.NET, not to be harsh but, what have you shown me, that you will be good at quadrupling my budget?
I’ve had some experience with LAMP, don’t know anything about Microsoft SQL, and to be frank, I’m not that interested in it. If I see a job posting for it, I will overlook it. I know several Oracle and PHP web designers and I’ve seen many jobs posted for them.
I have used MySQL in one project last semester and two major projects this semester. So far I have used Oracle… zero times. I have learned the commands in class, but unless I use it, I lose it. Sure, if I apply for a job, they can see that I am able to learn it if I need to, but if I can show at least some skill, knowledge or experience on top of MySQL, etc, it could help.
Is everybody so against Oracle that it bothers them I want to get some practice at it?
It’s not a matter of being against Oracle – people here are really trying to give you some good advice.
For a lot of projects, most DBMSes are pretty much the same. There’s a few minor differences in SQL syntax and how tables are stored and optimized, but anyone who’s familiar with a relational database can learn another one.
Oracle is designed for Fortune 500 companies running the largest, most complicated databases in the world. Oracle installations are not run by professional IT geeks, they’re run by professional Oracle people. Like, people who go to Redwood City and spend $20,000 on Oracle certifications.
So you can do your projects on Oracle and you’ll be familiar with it, but for what purpose? You won’t learn anything valuable that you can’t learn with other database systems. Unless you plan to specialize in Oracle stuff, any exposure you have to it on the job will probably be in one of two scenarios:
Somebody convinced a manager to buy an Oracle license for a project where it’s not necessary, in which case anybody with basic DBMS skills will be able to complete the task, or
It’s a project where Oracle really is necessary, in which case a highly trained DBA will be doing all the dirty work anyway.
That’s why people are telling you that spending what will probably be a lot of money on Oracle hosting won’t be worth it.
friedo’s right. I use Oracle at work and MySQL on my personal web host. Oracle is required for enterprise level, but MySQL is fine for a lot of things. The SQL and RDBMS principals are similar enough for you to learn by using MySQL, and if you want to get down and dirty with the stuff unique to Oracle, you’ll have to plan, run, and tune PeopleSoft in a production environment. I recommend using MySQL to get to where you can be an apprentice Oracle guru.
What about Triggers with MySQL, for you to use them you have to be an administrator, do semi-hosting plans give you administrator right on your databases? I know MySQL 5.1 has Stored Procedures, will that give me experience with Pl/SQL?
I’ve never tried to set up my own web-server using Linux or anything like that, would you recommend setting up MySQL (v.5.1 so I can practice Stored procedures) on my own server?
Or are triggers and group management / Security and things like that something that isn’t necessary to have experience in? (I don’t know, just now learning about many of these things in school, but they don’t talk about practicality, experience and trying to get a job, just theory)
Setting up Apache and MySQL (and SMTP) on your own box at home would be really great for someone who is a CS student wanting to learn more through experience.
There is PLENTY of free stuff out there for Linux Web servers that you could be tinkering with and learning. When stuff breaks, that’s when you get the most experience.
I highly recommend setting up your own Web server at home for learning purposes, and then using MySQL for more learning.
I currently have a WAMP server running on my PC and on my laptop. It’s set up for local stuff only though, I don’t know how to set it up as a web server yet. On my break I may look into it more. (I haven’t had much luck changing the settings, I have tried to set it up to turn output buffering off <I think, trying to make it so the php header() function works>, but the change never takes place, and I accidentally locked myself out of root once)
I also have an old 800 Mhz PC I was thinking of installing Fedora on and fiddling around with. I’ve been putting it off because I don’t really have room for it, and my poor power outlets are already maxed with two monitors, a PC with two hard-drives, an external hard-drive, speakers, etc.
