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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?"
I administrate 'Theoldnewsstand' (dot com), an archive of newspaper articles some hundreds of years old for genealogists to search for their family in these time periods. The system relies on MySQL and Linux, and we have some > 10,000 entries for articles now. I've found myself actually requiring to use this operating system to keep the great performance, and boy, does it work well.
Yes, exactly this is the case with consultants, big firms dont even add a door to a building without a consulting company coming in. And it is also a case of liabilities.
... but if for some reason it collapses (or the door gets jammed) you better have someone large behind you to lay the blame. (well, we hired Accenture, and they are the best, and they said a door there was a great idea, hell they studied it for 6 months!!)
Just as with the DB, if things run smoothly then everything is ok
IBM has starting doing research to get DB2 running *equally* as well on Linux as it does on AIX. Of course, DB2 runs fine for most installs on Linux but for a large RDBMS (of data warehouse size) the perception is that DB2 must run on AIX to perform well. IBM has been trying (and I'm sure it will take some time) to level the playing field. Perhaps, IBM wants to phase out their own AIX and replace it with Linux?
I remember, I installed and configured Oracle 8i 10 GB ( Not large wrt US standards.!! ) database on Redhat 6.2, for a Health Center - At a time when M$ was actively chasing license violators in India. It made perfect sense to go in for Redhat and the mgmnt was very pleased and were infact very happy to know that won't be paying anything for the OS. My last talk with them indicated they are still using it.!!
The City of Bloomington, IN will be doing this. All of our servers are Linux, with the exception of one NT machine for a small Progress database, and several HP-UX machines for Oracle. We'll be migrating them to Linux in 2002.
irb(main):001:0>
i myself am in the datawarehouse of a large international company, our DWH is run off IBM as400's with DB2 + essbase/hyperion.
there are several factors why there will be no change in this.
IBM offers complete intergrated solutions (HW+SW) that you dont get with opensource solutions.
the opensource rdbms cant compete with the likes of DB2 and Oracle in terms of scalability and features.
3rd party integration. (Esssbase/Hyperion) database cube solutions dont exist for linux/freebsd. (man 3d cube db's are funky)
stable cross platform ODBC drivers, (winnt drivers for ASP, JODBC java+websphere, AS400 + RS6000 drivers)
support. (who gives 24/7 support on postgress, and send out tech support guys giving consultations, will come on site on a sunday at 4am?)
what OpenSource rdbms provide true mutli language support (we have records in cryllic, japanese, american, german, etc)?
high availablity (i dont know the current state of HA functionality in the linux kernel)
Linux on the AS400 is not seen as providing anywhere need the requirements at present, and its opensource database solutions are same.
(and i dont even think there is any cube database products in the opensource area... ???)
no sig for you
Energis Squared runs the technical side of Freeserve and other ISPs. Most of their core systems are Linux based, with some Solaris and *BSD boxes in there too.
And patches from Sun never have any bugs. Yeah. Sure.
And the completely redesigned VM in Linux 2.4.10 meant that my cluster had a speedup of 1-2 orders of magnitude (heavy swap vs virtually none). And all of my systems running 2.4.10 (12 of them) have been up since the first boot. I'd rather have them fix things in the kernel than use a band-aid approach.
>because the Solaris development team were stuck in a mailing list flamewar.
Are you in elementary school? You seem to have no grasp of corporate politics. First, I wouldn't call it a real flame war. I read the mailing list every day, so I'm familiar with what is going on. Second, one difference between open source projects like Linux is that discussions are public; proprietary projects can have real warfare going on, but the conflict might not be known to the public. I bet you that the fight at Sun going from SunOS to Solaris would make any lkml flamewar look quite tame.
-asb
At my company we are in the process of switching our progress database currently running on a sco unix box to a new compaq server that will be running Red Hat. This database is extremely mission critical to our company (ie pays the bills. Progress is one of the best platforms I have ever used and is extremely stable on linux.
I'm *certain* there are companies out there using Linux to host "mission-critical" (whatever that means) RDMSes. But this by itself would tell us nothing of Linux's suitability for this purpose. I happen to know lots of companies that use Linux for this purpose, but they also are companies that would not be able to afford the Sun boxes and Oracle licenses that they wish they could run. I also know several places running Linux for - what they would consider to be - "mission-critical" RDMS, but what they consider to be mission-critical is FAR different than what a big investment bank or hospital would consider to be mission critical.
Instead of just asking a question that is almost guaranteed to pat ourselves on the back, we need to also ask for descriptions of the conditions that people are using Linux for RDMSes. That is, before the answer "are you using Linux" can be properly interpreted, we also need to know answers to questions like: How many connections ? How many users ? What size of a database ? What kind of availability do you demand ? What kind of information is being stored ? How big is your staff ? How big is your budget ?
After all, knowing that a company uses Linux to host Postgres/MySql tells us nothing if the company can't afford to buy a Sun box/Oracle license in the first place.
The PICK database (aka D3) is a little known database that's been around for about 20 years, and was ported to Linux about 4 or 5 years ago. This DB is fully implemented on Linux, and I've talked w/ people that have 1000+ users running. The DB itself has several million user-licenses in the field, and a lot of them are running Linux. The Linux implementation supports multi gigabyte DBs and the user count is limited mostly by the power of the machine. I think this counts.
A medium-size company (200-300 employee) in Italy (where I live) is migrating their data on a SuSE linux + DB2 solution.
They will use a couple of IBM server (dual or quad x86) in a failover configuration.
You have also to consider that in Italy we have an high number of medium-sized company instead of a (relatively) low number of big companies;
so the size of the company in question is quite big for our parameters.
In TUX we trust
Would we have had this if the software package was from Sun? Well, Sun might have blamed IBM, IBM might have blamed Sun and we'd be left with something which doesn't work. We've been lucky in that IBM want this to work to secure future business, and that is the carrot you can use to 'bribe' vendors to fix bugs.
While open source allows you to track down the bugs and fix them yourself, it relies on you hiring programmers and/or smart admins. Many companies don't want to do that, particularly when you can get the people who wrote the code to fix it (whether you can get them to fix it or not is a different matter; managers' perception is that you can and that's what affects buying decisions).
As for suing, it depends on the terms of the contract. A large enough business should be able to negotiate special terms with vendors to secure business (don't play ball with us, you don't get our money). If a company wants to be bullish enough, it can negotiate terms that do allow it to sue the company, even with UCITA and DCMA. Unless I'm mistaken, those acts mean that vendors are allowed to put horrible restrictions on sale of software etc. It doesn't say that individual purchasers can't negotiate a better deal.
One final point. I'm not saying this to say "linux is doomed, it's never going to make it". I have great hopes for linux (in my last job, I made a lot of use of open source software to good effect), but there are still a few things to be ironed out before big companies are going to adopt it in a large scale. Half of what I'm doing here is playing devil's advocate because I like a good argument (NB: argument != flame-fest!).
I work for a large manufacturing company. We run Oracle on OpenVMS. With all the nonsense going on with the Alpha since Compaq took over, we've started looking at Linux as an alternative. Hopefully we don't go with XP.
Yahoo!'s databases are all Oracle running on FreeBSD. If that isn't a testament to which OS is superior, I don't know what is.
What about Google?
Google has huge databases (caching the web). It is run on tons of linux boxes. Their entire business depends on speed and accurate information.
an article about Google