As the title suggests, my current painpoint on the SOHO front, is the restructuring of the database usage for the various applications and systems I have up. The main ones that offend me are my education forum (PHPBB2 with MS-Access, yuck!), and my genealogy site (PHP flat-file, hurl!!). However, a nice happenstance from the installation of my new blog software, WordPress (which is working great, as you can see), is that I was required to get a MySQL instance up and running. Since the packages listed above all can use MySQL as their database, it would seem a shame not to take this chance to migrate and consolidate all of my data needs on one platform and product. Also, I really would like to cut my last dependence on the Microsoft toolset – I can be fairly sure that once I am using MySQL as my database source, I can move the data tier of all my systems to a Linux box without any major issues. So, the next step is to come up with detailed database migration plans for both systems – I think this will be an interesting effort, since my previous DBA experience has all been on Oracle. Speaking of Oracle, I have finally had a chance to get back to my work on installing, evaluating, and experimenting with Oracle eBusiness Suite on Linux (11i/10G). My plan is centered on using Ubuntu as the OS, with LAMP and the appropriate Oracle stack running on top. So far, I’m still stuck at getting Ubuntu installed on my “server” (converted PC). I’ll post my experiences with getting this set up in the articles section of the site.