On Wed, 2002-11-27 at 08:21, Al Sutton wrote:
> The problem I have with VMWare is that for the cost of a licence plus the
> additional hardware on the box running it (CPU power, RAM, etc.) I can buy a
> second cheap machine, using VMWare doesn't appear to save me my biggest
> overheads of training staff on Unix and cost of equipment (software and
> hardware). I've been looking at Bochs, but 1.4.1 wasn't stable enough to
> install RedHat, PostgreSQL, etc. reliably.
>
> The database in question holds order information for over 2000 other
> companies, and is growing daily. There is also a requirement to keep the
> data indefinatley.
>
> The developers are developing two things;
>
> 1- Providing an interface for the companies employees to update customer
> information and answer customer queries.
>
> 2- Providing an area for merchants to log into that allows them to generate
> some standardised reports over the order data, change passwords, setup
> repeated payment system, etc.
>
> Developing these solutions does include the possibilities of modify the
> database schema, the configuration of the database, and the datatypes used
> to represent the data (e.g. representing encyrpted data as a Base64 string
> or blob), and therefore the developers may need to make fundamental changes
> to the database and perform metrics on how they have affected performance.
If you need metrics and the production runs on some kind of unix, you
should definitely do the measuring on unix as well. A developers machine
with different os and other db tuning parameters may give you _very_
different results from the real deployment system.
Also, porting postgres to win32 wont magically make it into MS Access -
most DB management tasks will be exactly the same. If your developer are
afraid of command line, give them some graphical or web tool for
managing the db.
If they dont want to manage linux, then just set it up once and don't
give them the root pwd ;)
--------------
Hannu
