Dear nairalanders, a friend from USA sent 15 cds of oracle to me when i know next to nothing about oracle. I wnoder why he sent them. but since it has arrived, i decided to take a look at them. so can someone tell me the one i need to install to take off. the cds are labelled: fail safe, start here, standard edition, personal edition, enterprise manager with oracle standard management pack, workflow client, application interconnect, message broker,client online, workflow server, transparent gateway, transparent gateway for ibm and that for sybase and another client. I know nothing atall, can someone advice

Hello ,

installing Oracle is a bit tricky , you cannot just install directly from the Cd's , it will take for ever and are prone to cyclic redundancies.
what you need to do is read the CD that says Start here in it u'll find the instructions on how to Stage the Cd's . which basically means coping the Cd's in to a hard drive in a certain order

hope this gives u a head start

There will be so many discs for sure - standard edition, personal edition, enterprise manager are different versions of Oracle so it depends on which version you want, I guess your friend has bundled everything and sent it to you, the most compact one is the standard edition while the enterprise is the one that is for big databases and database applications. However, you need to check if it also comes with the Oracle Database apart from the Oracle Client - the client is different from the database itself, if you dont have the database, the client is useless. Also it seems your friend has sent you the application for all other operating systems apart from for windows, e.g. for ibm, sybase and others, check the packages, the Windows version should be properly labelled, both the server and the client, but Oracle is of no use if you arent building databases and applications that manages databases that runs into million records.

Did he steal it?