Re: A question of copyright - Can you legally create Oracle EXPORT files from your own utility?

I have seen other freebie oracle utility. I remember one free Unix DBA tool that monitored your database for you. It looked pretty nice.

I cant see how this would be illegal. Powerbuilder runs on Oracle, so does toad, and SQL Navigator, DBA Studio and lots of others. What about people who build there GUIs in Visual Studio?

"Christopher L O'Sullivan" <itoys_at_tpg.com.au> wrote in message news:<3cda591d_at_dnews.tpgi.com.au>...
> I keep seeing requests on how to extract and re-load data into Oracle. Back
> in 1992, I wrote an UNLOAD utility [ who hasn't? ] to unload queries to
> re-load using SQL*Loader. It supported various formats [fixed, CSV etc]. I
> found LONGs to be a problem. SQL*Loader couldn't handle the new lines [even
> quoted]. I could not find a work around with loader. Then I thought about
> using good old Oracle IMP(ort). The format of the Oracle export file was
> pretty straight forward [well at least for TABLE mode exports using Oracle
> 7.2 (way back in 1995 or thereabouts)] so I switched to generating
> EXPORT/IMPORT compatible files. Real handy for schema upgrades and making
> test databases as subset of production [enough hype].
>
> I was wanting to release this UNLOAD utility as a freebie [yes I admit, as a
> little teaser to suck, I mean get people interested in a tool that I'm
> developing]. The question is, IS IT LEGAL TO CREATE ORACLE COMPATIBLE EXPORT
> FILES? Does anyone know?
>
> Is this another case of UNISYS and the GIF [LZW] controversy? Can anyone
> offer any [useful] suggestions?
Received on Thu May 09 2002 - 15:53:21 CDT