Oracle has a huge number of installations worldwide and Microsoft Business Solutions CRM is gaining its market share on the CRM market mostly for mid-size and small companies.
Sometimes we see the situation when a large company has an Oracle-based business system. Imagine you ship your goods worldwide and you do it in an Oracle custom system for ten years. In this case – even if you are looking for a budget CRM solution – you might still need integration between Oracle and Microsoft CRM, regardless of the fact that these are coming from different software application worlds: Microsoft and Java realms.
If you are a developer, you should probably be informed about two solutions:
Microsoft SQL Linked Server approach – using ODBC driver to Oracle, create a linked server in MS SQL Server 2000/7.0 and then use the OPENQUERY, OPENROWSET technique to access Oracle data. You can create cross-platform Transact SQL Stored procedures or views to facilitate your development.
Oracle Transparent Gateways and Generic Connectivity – these two give you control from Oracle’s side. If you feel that you are more comfortable with Java/Oracle, this is the way to go. Generic Connectivity gives you a common solution to access a database via ODBC and OLE DB mechanisms to FoxPro, Microsoft Access, etc. More interesting is the second product – Oracle Transparent Gateways. Its components are created individually for each platform, resulting in more efficient and fast access and better performance.
Currently Oracle Transparent Gateways are available for the following platforms:
The disadvantage is the fact that these products are not available for all platforms and are priced relatively high.
Boris Makushkin is senior software developer in Alba Spectrum Technologies US nation-wide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, based in Chicago and having locations in multiple states and internationally (www.albaspectrum.com ), he is Unix, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports, Microsoft CRM SDK and Exchange Server SDK developer. You can reach Boris: borism@albaspectrum.com
