THE OCELOT SQL DBMS PROJECT

This is the project page. It describes Ocelot's open-source nature, work objectives, developer requirements, and special interests. If you are new to Ocelot, you might want to visit these other web pages first:
-- Ocelot Computer Services Inc. Home Page
-- "Project Home Page" on sourceforge.net

Please read about the package, download it, then try it out, before coming back to this page and reading about the project.

Ocelot's Open Source Licenses

The idea behind Ocelot's "dual license" policy is to give a free SQL DBMS to both users and developers. The GPL is appropriate for people who want to combine with other open-source packages, since this is a popular license and it's truly free. The MPL is for developers who want to distribute copies of any Ocelot-based application, without paying royalties (some GPL-based DBMSs become very expensive because of royalties). We want to ensure that end-users and developers encounter no hassles and no costs, therefore we offer a choice. When you run the installation program, you pick whether you want to install with GPL or MPL. So "dual" means "either" license, not "both" licenses.

The dual open-source license does not mean that anything is public domain. Indeed, to protect the product from hijacking, we mark all portions of the code and the documentation: Copyright (c) , by Ocelot Computer Services Inc. We do ask that all contributions to the package be dual-licensed as well, and be assigned to Ocelot Computer Services Inc. for copyright, to avoid confusion. Notice that this gives Ocelot no commercial advantage -- we make $0.00 from sales or royalties for this product -- but it will inhibit some practices which are contrary to the spirit of an open-source project.

We sometimes get requests for interpretation of either the GPL or the MPL, couched as questions like "can I do thus-and-so with the package?" We answer that we are not lawyers, and we did not write these licenses, we only agree to abide by them. Since they are both standard and common, you can find out more about them by entering "GNU Public License" or "Mozilla Public License" on a search engine.

Work Objectives

We want to support SQL:2003 but development is currently at a stand-still.

The ANSI/ISO standards committees publish draft standards online, and sell the finished versions. See sql-99.org or sqlstandards.org for details and for specifications. The current version of the SQL standard is SQL-99 (also called SQL:1999), we expect the replacement to appear in 2003. Less optimistic observers will continue to refer to the next version of the standard as SQL:200n, until it appears. We will say SQL:2003. Do not confuse this with Microsoft SQL Server 2000's next version, which may also appear in 2003.

Right now, you probably know that we support SQL-99's core features, and many of the extended features. That's the specification for our project. If it's in SQL:2003, we want to do it. If it's not, we don't. We do not offer technical support for the package.

Simple as that is, it often confuses people with a preconception that we have some other objectives. We have no other objectives. Now let us be particular about what other objectives we do not have. One: we are not trying to compete with open-source SQL vendors such as PostgreSQL or MySQL or Firebird -- we wish them well. Two: we are not trying to scale up the product for very large databases or large numbers of simultaneous users -- the extensions we would have to make would have nothing to do with the SQL:2003 standard. Three: we are not trying to add features which would make us compatible with some commercial products unless they use ANSI/ISO standards -- even common items like CREATE INDEX statements are not appropriate for our game plan.

Developer Requirements

If you look for our list of developers, you probably won't find it. Well, there are some barriers that would make anyone reluctant to jump in. To list a few: it's a Windows package, most of the source code is assembly language, the potential user base is small, and we don't really ask for help with the engine.

Nevertheless, there's a lot that you could do if you like our product's objective and want to push it along. Training aids, front ends, language interfaces, ports to other (80x86-based) OSs, user relations, web site maintenance, or whatever you think would be a good idea ... we would welcome and appreciate your participation. Just remember that it would take a long-term commitment to become effective in what after all is a complex endeavour.

Special Interests

Some of us write books. We recommend "SQL-99 Complete, Really" as a text for the DBMS, as you know from the recommndations in the documentation; however, we do not make any royalty revenue whatsoever from sales of that book. We do make a few dollars a month from amazon.com by recommending SQL books from our web site, so if you want to support us a bit, enter amazon.com "via" our book review page when you want an SQL book. Even better, you can order our latest book "SQL Performance Tuning" (Addison-Wesley September 2002). We do get royalties for this book, and if you help make it a success, we'll be able to continue in the business of pushing SQL standards and portability forward. Help this worthy cause by recommending the book on bookseller sites, on usenet forums, or on your own web page by linking to this web page: http://www.ocelot.ca/tuning.htm.

Feedback

If you have an account with sourceforge.net (which is free), you can send a message to the forum on sourceforge.net/projects/ocelot. You can contact us directly by sending to the email address which you see when you install the DBMS. Er, you have downloaded and installed the DBMS by now, haven't you? Again, you can download from sourceforge.net/projects/ocelot or from Ocelot's download page.

Thank you from Ocelot Computer Services Inc.

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