draft blog post for Oracle help

[Tim Graham]

I've drafted a blog post to advertise our need for Oracle expertise. Please take a look and give feedback before it's published. Thanks!

Django team seeks help maintaining Oracle and Oracle GIS backends
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Several members of the Django team that have previously provided Oracle
expertise no longer work with Oracle in their day jobs, and therefore, the team
is seeking new contributors who have an ongoing interest in the backend.

Ideally, the team seeks to move the Oracle backend from "built-in" status, to a pip
installable backend that would be maintained under the "django" GitHub account.
Your duties would include monitoring a build that runs with Django master and the
latest version of the Oracle backend and fixing any issues that arise. To help with
the continuous integration infrastructure, knowledge of maintaining Oracle servers
would also be a plus, but these duties could be split among several people. Please
introduce yourself on the `django-developers mailing list`_ if this is something you
are interested in.

Also, the Oracle GIS backend has been broken for several months and
no one has answered `requests for help`_ on the django-developers and
geodjango mailing lists. If no one helps out, this backend will be dropped in
Django 1.9. This is the least used backend according to the `Django Developers
Community Survey`_, receiving 5 votes out of more than 3,000 responses.

.. _django-developers mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/django-developers
.. _requests for help: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/django-developers/2ritQ26PRLI/discussion
.. _Django Developers Community Survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Owv-Y_beohyCm9o2xPamdBnvjreNYoWai3rDloKZxWw/viewanalytics#start=publishanalytics

[Ola Sitarska]

Great job Tim! :) 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-develop...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to django-d...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/68c78921-001d-4171-bdd7-541f048734bc%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Jani Tiainen]

Hi all,

I'm volunteering myself to maintain both Oracle and Oracle GIS backends.

I've been developing applications based on Oracle for almost 20 years now and I've been maintaining Oracle installations and databases.

I've been developing with Django and it's GIS parts with almost 10 years now. I've previously contributed few very trivial patches and I've regulary keep answering questions on #django and hanging around in #django-dev with nick "jtiai".

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-develop...@googlegroups.com.
> To post to this group, send email to django-d...@googlegroups.com.
> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/68c78921-001d-4171-bdd7-541f048734bc%40googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--
Jani Tiainen

[Josh Smeaton]

I'll also stick my hand up to be involved with the Oracle backend, but not the Oracle GIS backend. I don't have a lot of time available at the moment, but I'll be able to support Jani and anyone else that's interested in maintaining the backend.

Cheers

[Marc Tamlyn]

Hi Jani,

Thanks so much for sticking your hand up to help maintain Oracle! It is an important part of our ecosystem.

Marc

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/f0c8315b-7e0f-4b0b-9223-09f4d6589d76%40googlegroups.com.

[Shai Berger]

Hi all,

On Wednesday 19 August 2015 15:06:17 Marc Tamlyn wrote:
> Hi Jani,
>
> Thanks so much for sticking your hand up to help maintain Oracle! It is an
> important part of our ecosystem.
>

I would like to add my voice in thanking Jani, and also Josh, for standing up
for Oracle. Marc is right, it is important to us much more than its popularity
indicates, because the availability of a well-supported Oracle backend signals
that Django can be used in the enterprise (the out-of-core SQL Server backends
help there as well).

As one of the (last) core members to lose daily interest in Oracle, I still
feel somewhat responsible for it, although I've been mostly kept busy with
other things lately. Some of these things are now finished, and I plan to put
some more effort into the backend and its move to a separate repo in the coming
weeks. To my regret, my ability to help with GIS is limited, and I am also not
a very good DBA, but I'll do what I can.

Tim, thanks for drafting the blog post. Although we have already got replies
for it, I still believe making the call for help more public can be of value,
and it should be posted; especially with the newer features of the ORM, the
Oracle backend requires substantial amounts of work, and it is better if that
can be distributed.

Shai.

[Mariusz Felisiak]

Hi everybody,

I would like to volunteer to help maintain Oracle and Oracle GIS backend. I have been developing (commercial) apps with Django framework and oracle backend for 8 years now. I am familiar with the problems associated with it because few times I have been forced to find ways to solve them:)

FeliXX

[Jani Tiainen]

All hands on deck.. ;)

I wouldn't mind having an additional pair of hands to help. Normal backend is in rather good shape - all tests do pass. GIS backend on the other hand is having more or less fun-to-fix issues.

I've made some progress to make current backend even pass the tests. If you want to help, you can poke me on #django or #django-dev irc channels so I can give you a sitrep what I know and what needs further investigations.

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-develop...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to django-d...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/bbb2ccfe-cc2b-4665-b440-6f211d2f8808%40googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--
Jani Tiainen

[Jani Tiainen]

On 08.09.2015 14:08, Jani Tiainen wrote:

All hands on deck.. ;)

I wouldn't mind having an additional pair of hands to help. Normal backend is in rather good shape - all tests do pass. GIS backend on the other hand is having more or less fun-to-fix issues.

I've made some progress to make current backend even pass the tests. If you want to help, you can poke me on #django or #django-dev irc channels so I can give you a sitrep what I know and what needs further investigations.

Hit enter too fast. I forgot to mention that my IRC nick is jtiai  :-)

[Tim Graham]

Another place to help is to update the instructions on how to run the tests with the Oracle Developer Days VM. The current instructions are for version 11 of the VM, but now Oracle only provides a VM for version 12.

https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/OracleTestSetup

[Mariusz Felisiak]

https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/OracleTestSetup instruction is ready, enjoy

[Tim Graham]

Thanks again for updating those instructions. Just a couple things:

1. The DATABASES setting should have an 'other' database as they did before.

2. I think the settings also need to define the 'TEST' option like they did before:

'TEST': {
    'USER': 'djangotest',
     'TBLSPACE': 'django_test',
     'TBLSPACE_TMP': 'django_test_tmp',
},

(At least I hope this is the reason that the tests are super-slow compared to the previous version of the VM.)

[Shai Berger]

Hi,

On Friday 25 September 2015 00:34:21 Tim Graham wrote:
> Thanks again for updating those instructions. Just a couple things:
>

I second that.

> 1. The DATABASES setting should have an 'other' database as they did
> before.
>
> 2. I think the settings also need to define the 'TEST' option like they did
> before:
>
> 'TEST': {
> 'USER': 'djangotest',

This appears to be wrong -- you are specifying that the main user be used as
the test user. That should not work without adding

'CREATE_USER' : False

without the test-user specified, Django will make (and destroy) a user named
test_djangotest.

> 'TBLSPACE': 'django_test',
> 'TBLSPACE_TMP': 'django_test_tmp',
> },
>
> (At least I hope this is the reason that the tests are super-slow compared
> to the previous version of the VM.)
>

If the tablespace names change anything, I will be surprised.
Either way, unless something funny is happening, none of the three settings
should have a major effect on test execution time.

Shai.

[Tim Graham]

For what it's worth, on my machine `time ./tests/runtests.py` takes about ~40 minutes for the Oracle 11 VM and ~53 minutes for the Oracle 12 VM (averaged over 3 runs for each).

[Mariusz Felisiak]

I updated https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/OracleTestSetup instruction.

[Jani Tiainen]

Just a note - Oracle announced few days ago official 12c docker images available (for free) from docker store. So there is now alternative way to have oracle database for testing.

See https://github.com/oracle/docker-images/tree/master/OracleDatabase  for scripts and

https://store.docker.com/images/oracle-database-enterprise-edition?tab=description

On 04.05.2017 22:02, Mariusz Felisiak wrote:

I updated https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/OracleTestSetup instruction.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-develop...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to django-d...@googlegroups.com.

Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/django-developers.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/657b52aa-6e42-4d77-90ab-644f894ce205%40googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

-- 
Jani Tiainen