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Oracle To Finish Linux Makeover This Year
An anonymous reader writes "According to a CNET News article: 'Oracle will finish switching its 9,000-person in-house programming staff to Linux by the end of 2004, the database powerhouse said Wednesday. In October, the company finished the Linux transition for the 5,000 programmers of its Oracle Applications software. Now the transformation has begun for those who work on the database product, said Wim Coekaerts, director of Linux engineering, in an interview at the CeBit trade show in New York.'"
This prompts me to ask the above question whitch I have been asking in several other places.
Was wondering what the potential was for using Linux on fairly standard PC hardware to run an Oracle server. Is anyone actually using one in a
production set up and if so what number of users/size of database/applications are they using.
What I was thinking was something like fairly standard main board (i.e. gigabyte/Abit) Inter/AMD 2000 (possibly dual) with 1-2GB memory (or even
less) and Serial-ATA (or possibly IDE RAID) disk.
I guess my question is can oracle be run on a sub 1000 system for real world applications in SME?
your general experiences/feeling (based on real world rather than theory) would be interesting.
Microsoft sometimes claims that it has more full-time programmers working on Microsoft software than there are working on Linux software. If we add up IBM, Novell and Oracle, all of which have moved thousands of programmers to Linux, do we have Microsoft beat yet?
Is it my imagination, or is there actually a reasonable migration to linux underway ?
I would imagine that Oracle had a long ramp up for this.
Putting it in perspective - the next chance M$ will have to try and pull accounts back is in two years time.
What am I getting at:
If Acme Co decides to start a Linux changeover today - it could be implemented before the next OS release by MS.
My Point: The traffic is really only going to go one way for at least two years (assuming that the companies that switch now benefit from the change).
[ Monday is a terrible way to spend one seventh of your life. ]
Anti-Linux zealots have been predicting the death of Linux since 1998, yet Linux is only getting stronger and stronger.
But I guess this, along with all the other switches (like the City of Large), won't make them stop flaming Linux all day.
Oracle isn't alone in embracing the open-source movement. Oracle are not alone, from the article: Dell is switching internal servers to Linux, while Novell is dropping Windows in favor of its own Linux desktop software for PCs.
Also various governments around the world have rejected Windows for Linux lately, the tide is turning.
Do you need a website upgrade?
The headline doesn't make it clear, whilst it is a good thing that migrations to Linux happen from all other OS's, it should be highlighted before the anti-MS crowd jump in too fast:
;)
This is a move FROM Sun Solaris TO Linux.
Oracle never used Windows for development because of portability issues to other OS's
Lest we forget, Oracle are switching their development platform from Sun Solaris to Linux; they didn't use Windows to begin with, as I think a number of people here assume.
This might be SCO's last chance to pound their bruised nose once more.
Oracle on Linux isn't a bad product. You can get the latest release; Oracle Database 10g Release 1 (10.1.0.2) for Linux x86 or Linux Itanium from their Oracle Technology Network website at http://otn.oracle.com/software/products/database/o racle10g/index.html for your own non-commercial use. I played with it for a while but went back to using MySQL only because performance seemed to be better than Oracle's on a Linux box. In all fairness though, the box was an old Dell Inspiron 7500!
I forecast hereby even it is only the workstation SCO will someday find some "unix" code within the Oracle Code.
A few years ago I saw a completely pimped out Pinto. Perfect paint, perfect everything. And in the rear window a panoramic landscape painting that was stippled so the driver could see through it.
As completely inexplicable as such things are, they do happen.
This is the natural thing to do. Oracle started out on VMS and Unix type systems, and departed later into Windows. Since they ported their install process to Java between 8.1.6 and 8.1.7, and with their moves into the Application Server arena, it is clear that they have platform transparency in mind. Coupled with the fact that Unix is the dominant server platform, and Linux is a decent form of free Unix, this is a good move.
I stole this
I have developed several large applications that involve an Oracle database as one of their components, but the idea of actually having to install Oracle anywhere sends shivers down my back (and not from joy). If this keeps up I can see future work centering around PostgreSQL, just to avoid the endless hassle associated with the installation.
Really, I like Oracle a lot, but I wish they would fix the endless installation issues...
because Oracle has been such a staunch supporter of Microsoft.... Oh wait, that's just the smack talking.
Oracle has so many cache levels and tuning options going on it's pretty easy to have it running slow. To be fair though, if basic MySQL does the job, you don't even need to look at something as complex (and complete) as Oracle. IMHO, a happy medium is either SAP DB / MySQL Max or Postgresql.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
This is perhaps both more and less significant that it first appears.
For those that don't know, from version 8.0 Oracle is in fact two seperate components, VOS (virtual operating system) and Oracle itself. VOS completely abstracts everything from the actual OS; Oracle programmers have their own APIs for file I/O, memory management, networking, threading, scheduling, you name it. To port Oracle to a new platform, VOS is ported, then Oracle itself compiled against the new VOS libraries.
Solaris was the primary platform, which meant that everyone developed on a Solaris box and then compiled against VOS on all platforms prior to release. This meant that inevitably useful new features went into Solaris first, but eventually they would have to be incorporated into VOS otherwise Oracle itself would fail to compile anywhere else.
So, this means that everyone gets a Linux box on their desktop, but they are still developing against VOS, and so while Oracle is pushing Linux as its platform of choice, all its other builds such as Solaris and AIX will remain current.
Migrating development from Solaris to Linux is not that hard - they're both Unices, and in my experience, Solaris as a dev platform... to put it politely... not the best out there. For a long time there's been no decent C++ compiler, their IDE is so-so, and for compilation speeds, a Linux workstation is beating Solaris unless you are prepared to pay some serious $$$ for a large server. Now migrating development from Windows is another story - there's MS Visual suite of tools, which are generally very good (and requires a different mindset at that). Getting people of that camp to work on Linux would be much harder.
Does this mean Oracle's web-based apps will finally be fully operational under Mozilla? It is incredibly frustrating to have to fire up Internet Explorer to manage some part of Oracle (9iAS management console for example).
sPh
MySQL is bound to be faster than oracle because compared to oracle it douse very little. MySQL is a small lean RDBMS whitch douse the basic stuff fast. Oracle douse a lot more and as a result of this is not so fast. This is why MySQL is very popular for holding web content and Oracle for complex business aplications.
They will be working "on" Linux ( that is, they will be running it on their desktop ), but they will not be working "on" Linux ( writing code for the OS ). Oracle developers will be working on Oracle software.
Now that Oracle is on board I am starting to wonder... Wonder if 30 years from now we are going to look back and wish for the early days of Linux. What if a company like Oracle (whom I hardly trust) uses our own savior of operating systems against us, to maybe enslave us all. Not literally of course but maybe you know where I am going. All the while, Bill sits in his pile of money while laughing at us for what the world as become and what we did to create it. I am not trolling. I love Linux but the bandwagon is getting full.
I had some problems installing Oracle on Linux until I found following website which shows you how to do it step by step for database and RAC:
http://www.puschitz.com/OracleOnLinux.shtml"
and not a mustang II?
Ah, I see, MySQL is faster than Oracle! Please, share more of your brilliant observations!
Since Oracle itself is transforming to Linux, may be installing Oracle Server on a Linux box will become easy. It took me 3 days to figure out how to install and configure Oracle on my Linux box.
Yes but, would a thief even think to steal a stereo out of a Yugo?
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Switching the programming staff from Solaris to Linux is no big deal. I'd be much more interested to hear what Oracle is doing with the PHBs, secretaries, marketers and other non-technical staff. I bet they're still on Windows.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
... who the winner of the next presidential elections will be.
from the article
...
Windows is the most widely used server operating system;
Striving to be common....
Striving to be common...
Now all they need to do is switch to Postgres. ^^
Oracle did not migrate from MS though. They previously used SUN workstations for development.
So? The point is, Oracle is sticking with Unix. In the late 1990s, the trend was to migrate from Unix to NT. Oracle has had their software available for NT for several years now, but they kept the whole ship running on Sun Solaris. Now they're moving to Linux. So... true, this isn't a "MS to Linux success story", but it is just as important... Oracle is stemming the tide and showing the world that porting and moving to NT is not necessarily the wave of the future.
Now the transformation has begun for those who work on the database product, said Wim Coekaerts
Wim Coekaerts? Did the family cat walk across the keyboard when his parents were making their "potential baby names" list, and nobody noticed?
Oracle needs to drop the "one Linux" fits all concept and to recompile against different (and up to date) distributions on a more frequent basis. Right now, Oracle for Linux is compiled against old versions of Suse with ancient glibc libraries. This causes its installation to fail on any modern distributation, unless you apply lots of compatibility patches and some ugly hacks to the configuation.
Because of glibc differences, saying there should be "one binary Oracle for all Linux" is like saying there should be one binary for all of Unix. Granted, the differnces betweeen Suse, Redhat, & Debian are not quite as drastic as the differences between Solaris, HP-UX and AIX, but fact remains that you can't install Oracle compiled against Suse 8 on Fedora without jumping through some major hacks.
Oracle needs to do frequent recompiles and offer different binaries for the various versions of Suse, Redhat AS, Fedora, Debian, and whoever else they decide to support.
Boy, that announcement has got to be frying Billy Gates' kippers & giving him sleepless nights. To have the most high-profile DB vendor switching to Linux for development is a setback in the World Domaination plan...
This is a move FROM Sun Solaris TO Linux.
You are correct.
BUT! Oracle stuck with Unix in general. They didn't move the whole ship, captain, and crew to NT as was common in the late 1990s. They're showing everyone that NT is not necessarily "the future" or "the only way to stay competitive" as so many other companies have said.
I'm wondering, if Oracle starts pushing into the Linux DB space, what will become of other Linux DB's like MySQL, PostGreSQL? Will support for them wane as companies flock the the "standard" of Oracle?
And yes, I realize that Oracle costs $$, there are scaling issues, etc. etc. But I'm talking corporate users here. Companies that can leverage Oracle on Linux might be less inclined to use (and support) the other OSS database products.
If Oracle offered a "free" version of their DB (say, personal edition) for users of linux without cost, would you switch from MySQL?
(posting anonymous since I've already moderated this topic.)
You would think so. I did some comparisons against Oracle and mySQL for a software engineering project and found some interesting results. Granted I was using the personal free version of Oracle not the 30K version. But yeah Oracle and mySQL are pretty equal in speed. Oracle is defintately no slouch but mySQL wasn't the ultra speed demon I was expecting either. I would say they were pretty close to equal. However Oracle did much better in one department and that was the number of concurrent users. No matter how many concurrent connections I threw at it it stayed at a steady speed. However mySQL started to slow down pretty bad as more users got added. This might not be the case on server hardware but on a fairly normal PC mySQL bogged down after too many connections were in use.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
... for an interview for a higher-level position (I'm a scientist, not a coder or manager), I think I can comment a little on the ramifications.
As pointed out, this is largely a shift from development under Solaris to development under Linux. In part, Linux is more of an open-book to work with, and they'd really like to see better consistency amongst UNIXes in their feature sets and APIs with regard to what Oracle uses. Going to Linux is a statement basically saying -- "we like the Linux environment and you'd do well to make yours like it..."
That said, there are other ramifications: where some had Sun workstations, others were using mid-range PCs with Windows as sort of heavyweight graphical terminals to develop on centralized servers. There's a shift now towards having more people developing on Linux on the desktop.
Basically, Linux has proven to be a far more comfortable and flexible development and general use platform for Oracle than the previous Sun + Microsoft setup before.
The Windows developers will undoubtedly use Windows, and many people will have more than one computer on their desk, each with a different OS. Both Sun and MS are taking it on the chin in this case, but for MS it's probably more a PR/Marketing problem. For Sun, it's bound to be a revenue problem.
FWIW - I currently work for a company where 48% of the desktops runs Windows and 48% Mac (4% Linux) -- and 90% of the application use is either web-based, Java, or X11 clients where the underlying OS isn't relevelent. The cost of the OS, maintenance, etc. is really the brunt of the cost of a desktop workstation. If the 10% of OS-native apps were not absolutely crucial (or they worked with Citrix/RDP), there would be little incentive to stick with the commercial OS offerings at all. As it stands, we already give preference to vendors that offer platform-neutral solutions and have ruled out many vendors that only offer Windows-server based solutions...
I don't think any of this is particularly uncommon (at least in my industry). If you are a software vendor, you better hope that you don't get a competitor that offers a platform-neutral/multiplatform solution similar to yours -- if so, you're sunk.
It's only for "geek use", this is the developers desktop we are talking about.
Oracle is not pro Open Source. They are a closed source vendor using OS to get at MS.
The "enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a flawed philosophy. Oracle, IBM are just as big a$$holes as MS.
lol so true.
Now, I can't comment on the performance, etc. at this point, but I can tell you the installation was miserable.
First of all, Oracle won't install without X, which this server wasn't going to have. There is an option for a completely non-interactive install which just reads the options from a file, but the installer still won't load without X installed on the system.
So, Oracle indicated that we could install the database and then remove X afterwards and it would still work. So, we started to install it and the component which provides the database creation utility wouldn't install. The error indicated that it didn't have sufficient permissions, though we had given write permissions everywhere it should have needed. We tried to track down exactly what it was trying to write, but the error message didn't give this information and the logs were empty.
We finally gave up on that utility so we had to do the whole database creation by hand, which Oracle doesn't make very easy. I was previously pretty much ambivalent towards Oracle before, but now this has me rather put off. I would switch to MySQL, but the customer is strictly for Oracle.
I have no objections to Oracle providing nice graphical utilities, but it shouldn't be this monolithic entity.
Are they asking to get sued by SCO? We all now everyone is switching to Linux, but you have to be quiet about it.
God I wish you were right. A non-windows Discoverer Admin client would make my day. Don't get me started on Jinitiator.....
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Comparing Oracle to mysql like that is like comparing some kind of car analogy to a truck analogy, they are useful for totally different things.
Mysql might be faster for some things, but it lacks all of the advanced features of Oracle, and lots of the less advanced features that Oracle has had since 1995.
Views ? Good transaction control ? Clustering ?
Not with mysql.
I think they are probably counting me as one of those three million (I signed up on one of their developer sites for a free copy of windows). While I can make a mean hello world program (and occasionally automate something in Excel), I daresay that you would find one hour of the oracle guy's time is yields you much more than I could do in a year.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Er, first thing I've really heard about it...
Granted I was using the personal free version of Oracle not the 30K version.
What's the difference (besides a 30k license)?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I am eagerly waiting for PostgreSQL to have reasonable exception handling in procedural languages (PL/pgSQL). Without this you can hardly do heavy-duty server-side programming.
Oracle is fast on high end hardware. Otherwise it is in fact one of the slowest databases. For example I put it on an Athlon XP 2500+ machine with a gig of ram, and not only did it instantly eat up all the ram, but performed marginally. A single Oracle connection requires 10 times the amount of ram as compared to a lightweight database such as MySQL. You've oversimplified things by just saying Oracle is fast. If given the right hardware, query time outweighs connection time, and the databases are extremely huge, Oracle performs well. Otherwise, it's too resource intensive to use reasonably.
If the 'free' version is what I think it is it is a VERRY cut down version of oracle (i.e. douse not have any of the advantages oracle is suposed to have over mySQL). However this is interesting. The question is can this 'free' version be installed to run with apache or is it only 'free' for personal use?
Wow, that'll be a lot of $699 licensing fees going to SCO.
So will they keep their SUN boxes but install Linux on them, or will they buy new PCs for all employees?
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Besides 30,000 US dollars I'm not entirely sure ;)
I've used Oracle in Enterprise applications and it seems to have the same toolset. I think the big difference is you couldn't use it for business purposes. After digging around on the Oracle site I was able to download the 10g Database free of charge. But from the licensing agreement:
"You man NOT:
?use the programs for your own internal data processing or for any commercial or production purposes, or use the programs for any purpose except the development of a single prototype of your application;
?use the application you develop with the programs for any internal data processing or commercial or production purposes without securing an appropriate license from us;
?continue to develop your application after you have used it for any internal data processing, commercial or production purpose without securing an appropriate license from us, or an Oracle reseller;
?remove or modify any program markings or any notice of our proprietary rights;
?make the programs available in any manner to any third party;
?use the programs to provide third party training;
?assign this agreement or give or transfer the programs or an interest in them to another individual or entity;
?cause or permit reverse engineering (unless required by law for interoperability), disassembly or decompilation of the programs;
?disclose results of any program benchmark tests without our prior consent;"
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
The version I had was 9i and was full featured. It had everything the paid for version did. I double checked this and posted a reply to someone already that explains how it works. You can't use it for any real purpose other then to lean how to use Oracle it seems.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
what's SCO going to do? Sue the whole world? Wait till all the court systems and law offices are running Linux...(of course, some already are)...then what? They won't be able to get a "fair" hearing! :)
I think you all are missing the point, which is not that Oracle is going to put Linux on their developers' desktops, but that Linux will be the platform upon and within which Oracle develops its database server code. This is extremely significant for the Oracle market, because it means that, from now on, Oracle will release its new versions and patchsets for Linux first and foremost, with all of the other platforms sucking hind tit.
The way I look at it, it's not so much a "single front" as a "single 'style'" (I'll stop myself JUST short of saying "standard").
Linux, *BSD, MacOSX, Sun, AIX, etc aren't QUITE a "single front"...but they all seem to be moving in a direction of interoperating with, and being more portable to, each other than MS Windows does with anything else (heck, they all probably work with WINDOWS better than Windows works with anything else...)
Increasingly, it seems like the IT world is moving towards portability and compatibility...EXCEPT for MS Windows. Windows seems to be ever more tightly imploding into itself in an attempt to exclude competitors. A previous poster mentioned that MS wants to position MS SQL as "the" database server for Microsoft Windows. Much as Internet Explorer is "the" browser for MS Windows, and MS Office 200x is "the" office suite for MS Windows, and "Outlook" is "the" mail client for MS Windows, and "SharePoint" is "the" WebDAV-(sorta)-based document sharing platform for MS Windows...and so on and so forth. They mess with the standards (I notice that SharePoint(tm) uses a non-standard mechanism for doing searches, so it won't be compatible with anyone else's compliant WebDAV client. Imagine that.) Unfortunate for Microsoft (but fortunate for everyone else - including "consumers" I think) the "everyone else" category is now large and influential enough that they don't have to capitulate to MS to stay in business.
I think EVENTUALLY even MS will have to adjust their business model and developement to play nicer with others (at least from a technical perspective), but I get the feeling it'll be ALMOST too late for them by the time they get around to doing so.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
no thanks.
a db should not require *ANY* X components to install, run or maintain, period.
whoever @ orcacle is reponsible for this "feature" should be shitcanned.
It seems to me that stories like this are just proving that many big development companies have always wanted two important things.
1. An inexpensive, fast, and stable OS with the strength of Unix.
2. Inexpensive plentiful hardware to run the OS and apps.
Boom, Linux shows up on cheap PCs and the proprietary Unices(?) on expensive hardware start to feel the pinch. In the end it looks like Linux and FreeBSD will dominate the high end while Windows dominates the desktop.
Now for some fan service: It seems likely that Windows is in real peril here, because while they can continue to do well on the desktop, we may be entering a post-PC age where non-PC devices may dominate. Like, I'd love to be able to send my mom email, but she doesn't really use a PC and rarely has an ISP. But she does use a cell phone (like who doesn't now), so text messaging may be the next best thing. I'm sure Microsoft is aware of this too and is betting the farm on Longhorn to stop anymore defections to Linux on the server/development end. I know it was Sun that got hurt in this case, but high profile stories like this won't help MS. If Longhorn doesn't deliver the goods, look for a long downward slide in market share.
Of course, in the end, maybe we'll see a Microsoft Linux distro! Eeck!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Oh, and fact that having a GUI-only installer forces you have to either have an X windows client + server or rig up a GUI server to talk to the client libraries on a server in your DMZ is just plain stupid. The place where you have (often by company policy) text-only Linux installs.
Price considerations aside, PostGreSQL is better just because you don't need to fiddle around with special install and maintenance procedures that are contrary to most companies' security policies for servers.
Oh, and they should keep up with the GLIBC versions, too.
For a company going "linux first" they're doing a pretty piss-poor job of it.
...and I *still* get ORA-07445 errors!
700$ Oracle?
Last time I checked it was like 40K$ per CPU
plus 100$ per end-users at the extreme back-end.
Are you sure you got it from otn.oracle.com ?
Your machine had 512 MEGABITS (YOU said "Mb", I didn't!) of RAM? That'd be... what... 64MB of RAM. I doubt that would be enough. I believe you meant "MB", which means "megabytes".
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
It insists on running as root and is vague about changes it makes to a bunch of stuff, and runs a horribly large Java installer that forked like crazy on my Debian test box (probaly because I didn't let it run as root). All I wanted was a couple of libraries, and didn't want to let it fsck^w modify my system. In the end I used Postgres instead because I didn't have time to pick apart their installer to get the bits I wanted.
:o)
I'm not going to swap from Debian to Red Hat for one part being developed for one application. OTOH, if I was rebuilding our main database, I'd probably try those pre-built and certified Red Hat servers.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I work at Oracle on Oracle Applications and here Windows is used by everyone, I mean _everyone_. Red Hat Linux is available from the desktop via X-windows, to manage source control, use sql*plus, perl, and whatever other stuff. But all the main development tools (Jdeveloper, Toad, etc) run on Windows. Not to mention that Oracle Apps work on the horrendous IE. Recently (couple weeks ago) they even did another clean install of Windows 2000 on everybody's computer....
Having driven by the building one day, I think I can speak for the company's strategic direction... And get rated +5 Informative! Funny.
No, I am just kidding...
From Oracle's web-site, I got Oracle Database 9i Personal Edition - Named User Plus Perpetual - Users: 1 Full Use
Plus the CD pack for Linux Intel, plus shipping, all for just over Can$690.00
I don't use the 'i' part of 9i - I just use the database, SQL*Plus, SQL*Loader and PL/SQL.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST