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Oracle's Infrastructure Now Fully Linux-ized
mbadolato writes "An article over at InformationWeek reports
Oracle is aggressively adopting Linux both internally and for its products, despite SCO Group's threats earlier this week that it may sue those who don't pay licensing fees to the company. Chuck Rozwat, an Oracle executive VP, says the company has moved its IT infrastructure to Linux, a year after CEO Larry Ellis issued the mandate. In the coming year, Oracle will move its base development platform to Linux, including putting the open-source operating system on the workstations of 8,000 developers"
Since when did Larry Ellison drop the last two letters of his last name? Come on, editors...
There is precioius little Larry likes more than shoving his thumb into BillG's eye. But it makes perfect sense for them. The OS is free, and it runs nearly everywhere; you can see exactly what it's doing because you can see (and modify) the source code.
As a target platform for their software, it's perfect. Why run Oracle on Windows if you can use Linux on Intel? And if you don't want to spring for the expensive hardware, you aren't gonna use a proprietary Unix.
Could've happened to a nicer company. Ellison won one of the Golden Jackboot awards for pushing a national ID card system backed by Oracle databases. Here's the Google link for the stories.
Ellison No Longer board member of Apple.
Help fight continental drift.
Same guy as above (again, anonymous).
.... well, i'm sure someone out there could figure something out. ;-)
I'm not in one of the groups doing the actual migrations, so i'm not privy to the information about specific distributions. But even so, I'm not sure if i'd say exactly which distribution would be used. After all, most likely it'd be a commercially available distribution (to get the support) and some certain people could use this 'insider' information to do some
But, as another sidenote, Oracle has been doing specific builds & testing on a variety of Linux distributions for awhile now.
And for those with particular interest, I was helping someone who was doing some Linux-based work and they were running GNOME. Maybe we can turn this into KDE/GNOME issue! (just kidding)
Most likely.
The readline folks are real fanatics. They've continually denied requests to put readline under LGPL - they want to make sure the only things that use readline are GPLed. That is, they're doing this on purpose.
Because of this debacle, the *BSD camp was forced to come up with the editline library for all their stuff. And then you have stuff like Sun's dbx that has its own readline replacement. And Oracle's SQL client, and Sybase's isql, and sqsh, ....
Now, it's not quite trivial to write a readline replacement because you have to deal with all sorts of crufty, non-portable *nix terminal arcana, but it's also not difficult. The problem is that all readline replacements are incompatible with each other. You can customize readline applications through .inputrc - this is really cool because you can make one binding and it works in bash, gdb, your (GPLed) console mp3 player, etc. However, these bindings won't carry over to FreeBSD's cdcontrol program or Sun's dbx.
The GPL also means that I can't use readline for some program I write for a client because these programs are usually internal company things that the company owns and can license however they want - they won't pay me if I stipulate that the code I wrote (which belongs to them) must be licensed under GPL for such a trivial reason. Since my clients won't be too happy paying me to write stupid terminal IO routines, I'm forced to either use plain old fgets or use editline, which (IMHO) is not as nice as readline.
The fanaticism is costing the *nix community some useful functionality, which is kind of sad.
Plenty of people
have gotten it to work
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Have things changed?
A "few years ago" was the height of Sun's dot com bubble. If you wanted to run Oracle reliably, you bought Sun/Solaris/Sparc servers along with expensive storage hardware. Trying anything else was "risky". Compared to now, Linux was far more experimental. Oracle had just announced it was going to support Linux. Oracle's support for linux helped put companies like RedHat and VA Linux on the map. Early pioneers tried Oracle on Linux and bot burned. It's gotten alot better today now that Oracle doesn't have to keep chasing the moving target of the distribution du jour or kernel of the month to support their customers.
My biggest gripe about implementing Oracle on Linux is installation. Even with a generic RedHat Advanced Server install (one of their "supported" stable platforms), there are problems with with linking libraries or even just using unzip that just don't seem to make sense (should have been caught in QA). If you don't use their blessed commercial Linux OS distributions, you won't find any suppport from Oracle and scant support from the metalink user community. It helps if you know Unix/Linux enough to debug their shell scripts to figure out what's breaking.
Once we were done installation, our applications and databases ran similar Solaris systems (i.e. knowing how to make patches, managing backups, etc.). Our previously-Sparc-based DBA felt at home using the database tools on Linux. The best part is that our hardware and OS combined cost 25% comparable Sun hardware. We could afford to buy two servers and use the other as a cold backup. If we ever run out of memory, it's dirt cheap to buy more PC DDR SDRAM.
Now that Oracle is reportedly using Linux everywhere, perhaps they'll tune their installation process.
- a sysadmin
I'm developing a postgresql database right now,
and wow does postgre suck for development. You better get all of your table declarations perfect the very first time and never EVER, EVER have to change them AT ALL, because once you have one row of data in there, forget about it. T
he only way to edit a column definition is to delete it and readd it with the correct properties, which means taking the DB offline, copying the whole table to a temporary table, deleting the offending column, readding the column, and then moving all of the data back into the old table from the temporary one, and now since your columns are in a different order, you have to play fun games to get that to work right.. then you can delete the temporary table, and put the DB back online, PURE TORTURE.
MYSQL completely supports editing column definitions on the fly, thought 20 characters was enough for a column, but now you need 50? no problem. Thought 3 sig dig was enough for that decimal field, but now you need 8? Go for it... No such support whatever in PostgreSQL.
Do you need sophisticated, automated input? Use sqlloader. Need sophisticated, automated output? Use rman. Need sophisticated, automated schema management? Use sqlplus.
Oracle comes with gobs of very powerful tools, and sqlplus is just not designed to do what you think it should be doing. It seems like you are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It's like complaining that climbing a fire escape is hard when you live on the third flool. Use the stairs.
BTW, if your doing SW development with oracle, use tora(free) or toad($$$). Both these tools make poking around and doing arbitrary queries a snap. Or, take your pick of the thousands of jdbc-based apps that live on sourceforge.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
You, sir, are full of shit. Witness (the output isn't exactly what you'd see because of the crappy lameness filter and the limited Slashdot HTML options):
So: not only can you do the operation without taking the database down, you can do it while within a transaction, and even rollback the entire change if you screw up!
This is under PostgreSQL 7.3.3.
Try that with your vaunted MySQL.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
It is not that painless. We usually do in our db migration scripts:
Works well for any table definition changes. Doesn't require taking the DB offline. Doesn't change order of columns unless you want it.
--
Ilya Martynov (http://martynov.org/)
It seems that people's experiences vary on this. Certainly your complaints were valid in the pre-7.0 days, but PostgreSQL has improved an amazing amount since then, especially after the introduction of 7.2. The current stable version is 7.3.4, and 7.4 is right around the corner.
Much of the scalability issue you mention has to do with the default settings regarding shared memory, buffers, etc. The PostgreSQL developers have been very conservative about the defaults, because they want the database to run on the widest range of hardware possible. Unfortunately that leads to a "least common denominator" approach and the end result is a database that out of the box performs suboptimally on most systems in order to run on almost all of them.
But if you change the tunable parameters to values that are much closer to the actual hardware you're running the database on, the performance increases a great deal.
Some people have gotten very good scalability out of PostgreSQL as a result. I'm sure you're aware of the PHPBuilder article that talks largely about the scalability issues. That was written some time ago, and PostgreSQL has gotten quite a lot better since then.
It doesn't work for everyone. MySQL has the advantage of having a rudimentary replication mechanism out of the box, and its full-text indexing is much easier to set up and use. It's also much easier to upgrade between major versions (PostgreSQL requires that you dump and restore if you're upgrading to a new major version, e.g. 7.3 -> 7.4). But in the general case, PostgreSQL seems to me to be a much more capable database than MySQL is.
I don't know of any other database, commercial or otherwise, that allows you to write stored procedures in Perl, Python, or TCL. That alone might be worth the few tradeoffs.
If you're running a relatively old (7.1 or earlier) version of PostgreSQL, you might want to give 7.3.4 a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
I've heard that PeopleSoft will be the next big guy to run their products under the Linux environment. Better development platform to make changes to their product. Can anyone confirm?
From the article: Oracle maintains its bullish stance on Linux, despite the copyright, intellectual-property, and unfair competition lawsuits introduced by various players in the market.
Who are the various players? SCO, SCO, and SCO?
This article makes it seem like Linux is the churning center of numberous legal actions by disparate parties, when to the best of my knowledge, there's just one bad apple (SCO) throwing (vague, unsubstantiated) accusations around weekly.
Surely if there were other Linux-related legal actions going on /. would be covering them daily!
I hate to throw religion into this, but don't judge your neighbor for having a speck in his eye when you have a plank in your own.
Then don't make it a religious statement. What I don't understand is this, how does an announcement of Oracle switching over their developer desktops to Linux have anything to do with making Larry Ellison a hero? Oracle has been saying they plan to move their entire infrastructure to Linux as soon as possible. This is just more of the movement becoming a reality.
Why you want to demonize either party in your diatribe above or make this out to some holy war makes you seem to be more of a zealot than not. The odd thing is that alot of Pro-Microsoft or Microsoft-biased persons are constantly screaming about how their is Linux zeal in every corner you go to. Of course, to deny that their isn't any would be stupid but I've observed the exact opposite, most if all discussions on topics like these seem to be Pro-Microsoft persons being extremely defensive and almost hostile to anything regarding Linux. Unbiased persons are alot more accepting of the concepts Linux itself is based on.
It would really help to keep your arguments about an issue actually on the issue in question and to not tie in other facts which are based on entirely different scopes and might have an undetermined amount of degrees of seperation involved.
Work around: get readline source code (I'm using 4.3), build and install example/rlfe, alias sqlplus='rlfe sqlplus'. This program can transparently add readline to command line programs unaware of readline.