OFF Topic. FreeBSD SAP & Oracle Financials.

[Jorge Biquez]

Hello all.

I am sorry if this is OFF Topic. I am looking for help from more 
experienced people in these areas.

I am looking for a job and one company is looking for people to 
create a test team (part of the quality assurance team). Their 
projects is based on SAP and Oracle Financials systems.  I used SAP 
and Oracle Financials some years ago and I do not have a chance to 
create a lab for me to study them because of the nature of those products.

I thought that could help me a lot to try to emulate a lab installing 
Oracle as a database under my Freebsd personal server . That way 
maybe I can at least recreate the database schema (if I get it) and 
try to understand how it works and maybe , as part of the study , try 
to run reports and populate the database in some way (maybe PHP or Ruby?).

Questions.

- IS there any version of Oracle that I could install under FreeBSD 
(actually on 7.3)?

- Since I am in the process of learning to be more prepared for new 
projects as an Independent IT consultant, I would like to be able to 
learn tools that help me in the projects/job search. So IN this case, 
assuming that I can recreate someway with Oracle or MySQl or 
Postgresql the tables I need to study and assuming also previous 
experience on programming

How would you see to use Ruby for a crash course on accessing and web 
publishing the information on those tables? (actually I continue the 
process of learning Python but I am not ready , yet, for the web 
part). If You think Ruby could be faster , any resources you point me 
to are really appreciated.

- Finally . If you know of places of where I can get information, 
free if possible, about the actual version of Oracle Financials and 
SAP. Technical manual and the operational , administrative ones. I 
would love to hear where. I have tried of course the companies for 
SAP and Oracle financials but at least from here I can not access 
anything if I am not a consultant certified by them. Any suggestions?

I know this could sound as a waste of time project (trying to emulate 
the operation of SAP and Oracle in some part) but for sure I can not 
have access to a real application and besides with the Ruby learning 
I guess I could be in better position for future projects.

As always thanks in advance for your help and comments.

Jorge Biquez