A lot of bandwidth was recently dedicated to the idea of using
IB for upsizing from Access. I'm more interested in downsizing
(rightsizing?) from Oracle. Today, proposing a non-Oracle solution
within a Fortune 500 company can be a career-limiting event. Yet
often, a solution involving IB would make more sense based on many
factors: cost, ease of deployment, support, technology.

I think that better portability between IB and Oracle would help
enormously. For example, while it might be inconceivable to "sell"
the idea of deploying IB, it might be reasonably easy to sell the
idea
of "develop with IB, deploy with Oracle." This way IB would compete
with Personal Oracle, Oracle Lite, and the 8i line of products, where
I think IB holds strong advantages. However, the Oracle smaller
siblings have the advantage of nearly complete compatibility with the
Big Brother.

In terms of potential number of users, it may not be as large as the
Access upsizing, however, I think that this profile of users can be
very beneficial for the Open Source. Specifically, I think that the
skilled, yet bored, programmers will be more likely to contribute to
IB than the engineers, accountants, etc. who develop applications
with
Access or VB, but lack the skills or desire to dive into the database.

Some of the portability items that are important to me are:

1. Oracle functions. I think that a UDF library patterned on
functions available in Oracle would be very useful.

2. Database links. Maybe even an Oracle gateway?

3. Something like index-organized tables or cluster-index tables. I
have a table with over 150 M rows (and growing) with non-unique index

(typically about a 1000 rows per unique index value). I'm currently
using Oracle's cluster-index table for this with very good results.
I've copied the data to IB, but Oracle does have a performance
advantage.

My point is not to start a debate on "this is how you should do it
with IB," but rather how to use IB and Oracle side-by-side and start
removing the management fear of non-Oracle database.

Bye,
Jerzy