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Are There Large RDBMS Using Linux?
Jason Perlow of Linux Magazine writes:"
With all of the recent computer press coverage of Amazon and Intel converting their
web servers and other front end application servers to Linux, many of these stories
neglect to mention that the back end systems these companies use still rely on
commercial Unixes like Solaris, AIX and HPUX to host their RDBMSes (Oracle, DB2,
Sybase, Informix) for their mission critical transactional applications and data
mining.
Are there any companies out there actively using Linux to host a mission-critical
RDBMS ? or looking to replace UNIX with Linux for this purpose?"
Case studies on ibm.com that favourably argue the use of Linux and DB2 on S/390? I'm going to buy one right away! If IBM sez it is good for me to buy their stuff then who am I to argue!
;-)
</FLAMEOFF>
Ancient Budo Master once told me: "All your bruises are belong to us."
If you have to use Access, you can connect to it via PHP or Perl from Linux using ODBC Socket Server, located at http://odbc.sourceforge.net
ODBC Socket Server is an open source database access toolkit that exposes Windows ODBC data sources with an XML-based TCP/IP interface.
It has clients for PHP, Perl, C (in Windows, Mac, and Linux), Java
.
because the Solaris development team were stuck in a mailing list flamewar.
Or because a team member was actually getting laid that week...
I've seen an R/3 rollout running on top of Oracle on Linux, but only in small classroom settings. Most of the SAPs training courses are taught on Linux based systmes.
I'm an AIX Systems administrator, and yes I do cry myself to sleep at night....
I want to give an anecdote of client leverage that sort of relates. This is a third hand story, but knowing the person who told it to me I suspect it's true.
A friend of mine was consulting many years ago with a large financial firm helping them to maintain their Netware 3.x servers.(as you can see it was several years ago) They had a tape backup system in house from one of the really large vendors that was not working.
They went for like a month where they could not get good reliable tape backups on the servers, and playing phone tag with the vendor trying to figure out the problem. Just wasn't working.
Anyway towards the end of the month, my friend griped to the CIO about the problems they were having and his frustration with dealing with the vendor. The CIO brought up the issue at the board meeting and how it was a risk to the company.
At this point the VP of trading piped up... "You know, we own several million shares of that company in our portfolio... let me see what I can do"
VP of trading calls up the President of the vendor company, tells him that if they don't fix the problem with the tape backup software he's going to issue a warning about the companies product quality and dump every single share of their stock on the market.
The next morning a team of developers were flown in and working on the problems. They had to recompile several modules, but they had the issues resolved within two days.
I guess the point is, there are many ways you can leverage a vendor. It doesn't have to be a lawsuit.
As larien said, usually you just threaten to not pay the contract, or not renew. Or add stipulations as part of the negotiation. I've been involved in many an instance where that has played a huge part in getting better support.
Once I had some issues with a GIS package we had purchased. I tried to work with support, and they ignored me. So when the $5k yearly maintenance agreement came up, I told my boss not to pay it because it didn't gain us anything. I also posted a note to a usenet group explaining my problem.
Next day I got a phone call from the development manager.
Financial incentives are the strongest leverage you can have with a software vendor. Like it's been pointed out... that doesn't work with Open Source in quite the same way.
"What legitimate member of the
Spend time in enough meetings with Admin management and director types and you too can speak like this.
We've just installed an IBM server and there's a problem with a couple of bits in it (I won't give details as I don't know if I'll get into trouble for it...).
I don't have security clearance, but I'm guessing these secret bits are 0 and 1.