Hi Bill,

> There are several on Oracle's web site itself. All you have to do is join Oracle Technology Network.

True. However, I found them significant less useful than VFP forums. Especially annoying was that every time I encountered a message describing the same problem as I had, the conversation would eventually turn into a private thread between Oracle support and that customer. All you could see was the message headers.

> Oracle is also freely available for download provided that it is being used for development and learning purposes only.

Yes, although the license is a little less flexible than that. You can only use the software for developing the first prototype of your application. After that you would need to buy licenses. For the database it's not really expensive, though. A license also gives you access to Metalink and the latest patches, which the OTN download does not.

> Oracle doesn't have any more Windows versions than any other product.

What I meant is they frequently have releases for Windows 32 bit, 64x and 64bit Itanium sometimes multiple versions for different versions of Windows. With the various combinations sometimes there are six to eight different download packages that don't seem to come from the same sources, given that for some of them patches are released earlier than others.