Search and Fax from Oracle Purchasing: Easy as Pie

July 17, 2010

Every once in a while I realize why Oracle database administrators are thrilled with their jobs. I don’t use facsimiles too often any more. I still have a fax machine, and I use it to communicate with one of my three legal eagles. None of these folks is into electronic mail, SMS, or taking telephone calls. A post on the San Francisco Blogger Community reminded me of the hula hoops that Oracle administrators must keep swinging to accomplish simple tasks.

Assume you have run a query on the Oracle table and you have the information required in one of those plain Jane Oracle text reports. You have to fax that report to 20 field offices. Do you code the fax numbers into the Brother MFC 8820D or do you write a custom script, pass the Oracle output to the Omtool Genifax system and sit back thinking about your next vacation?

Oracle certified professionals may go with the vacation method because of the complexity of the process required to perform a quite simple task. Navigate to “How Would I transfer the Info from a PO in Oracle to a Text File That Genifax Can Pick Up and Fax Out?”

The key is an “indispensable report to a content record.” Any questions about why a CFO’s effort to replace an Oracle database centric system with a lower cost, more programmer friendly system? Thought not.

The Oracle administrator when it comes to retrieving a record and faxing it has more power than the top bean counter. That’s why NoSQL vendors face significant push back when pitching alternatives to the decades old Codd database in my opinion. From my vantage point in the goose pond, the cost of using certain traditional enterprise information systems may force abrupt, non linear change.

For some organizations, the shift will come too late in the game to have a material impact I fear.

Stephen E Arnold, July 17, 2010

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Database, Enterprise, News, Technology, Text processing

Comments

One Response to “Search and Fax from Oracle Purchasing: Easy as Pie”

Matt McKnight on July 19th, 2010 2:51 pm

This doesn’t make any sense. How is this any easier with CouchDB or Cassandra?

While putting code in the database is often a job security move, have you even heard of a purchasing system written in a non-transactional NoSQL database?

I can see moving away from Oracle to Postgres, MySQL or the like, but why NoSQL?

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.