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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.'"
Databases are usually pretty disk intensive, so I would probably go for SCSI disks. Anyway - when the hardware costs are dwarfed by the Oracle licence cost - why skimp on the hardware?
Sure, depending on the load the server is
going to get.
At my office there's a Pentium 3 with 512 MB
of RAM running just fine with Oracle 9i on Redhat 8 for a small intranet site (about 60 users).
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
Oracle did not migrate from MS though. They previously used SUN workstations for development.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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!
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.
Did you forget, this is slashdot. Post first, read the article later!
[ Monday is a terrible way to spend one seventh of your life. ]
Arcane knowledge?
If you install it on the supported linux versions, the process is pretty well documented.
Going for a non-supported config will be a bit of pain, but there's information around the net with help on how to do it. Considering the level of complexity of the software, I woudn't expect otherwise.
BTW, its supported under RH ES, Suse SLES and United Linux. I've seen it installed under RH9 and some other platforms with some tweaking. Obviously, who would run a production database on unsupported OS escapes to me.
There have been, and probably still will be, some issues installing Oracle on various linux distros. Currently Oracle only support Red Hat and (I think) Suse. However, the 10g installer had an option '-ignoreSysPrereqs' which enabled me to install it on Mandrake 9.2 with 0 errors :-)
A couple of things;
a) Oracle moved from SUN to Linux and not from MS, so there is no loss there.
b) MS still gets licensing fees from OEMs so anytime a big company buys a few thousand Intel based workstations, MS still get a stack of cash regardless of what OS you run on them.
I honestly think the whole Intel/MS licensing thing is the biggest thing holding back Linux from gaining acceptance in the small to mid size firm (at least in the desktop market). There just isn't any financial incentive to not run MS operating systems when you get it free with every system you buy and financial reasons are the only ones that are going to persuade businesses to change.
Admittedly Linux will continue to gain market share in areas such as file and print serving where Samba is both cheaper than a Windows Server license and also performs better but MS got where it is today by having its desktop as the de-facto choice. Every chimp (manager) used it on the desktop so assumed that it was the way to go for servers.
"I'm tired of all this 'Aren't humanity great' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes" - Bill Hicks
http://your_oracle_host:port/dev60cgi/f60cgi?ji
Of course, make sure you have the latest Java runtime installed.
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"
We have a sitewide license for Oracle, so the license cost wasn't an issue for the department, but hardware costs were.
We set up an unused desktop PC with a copy of Red Hat Advanced Server (P3 730Mhz, 512 Mb RAM) and it is running several databases in Oracle which compare favourably with our aging Sun boxes. What's more, because IDE drives are so cheap we got several huge disks and got reliability and speed extremely cheaply.
Well worth the try if the license cost is not a issue.
Actually, the Oracle Enterprise Manager which comes with iAS 10g says it supports Mozilla 1.4+
--
The world is divided in two categories:
those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.
You could run Oracle on low-end hardware but why?
Because Oracle is fast. Very, very fast. Not only is it fast, but it has serious database features. Its like putting a $30,000 engine in a Yugo.
Also, Oracle allows you use their database for development and prototyping for free. You don't need to pay for a license, or for high-end hardware to host the system, until you are ready to deploy.
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.
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.
Oracle is not fast. Not not fast. Speed isn't Oracle's game. Data integrity is. The point is that you sacrifice speed for things like real atomicity.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
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.
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,
I'm not sure I understand you here, but there seems to be a confusion between operating system and development tools. There is no such thing as a 'Solaris IDE', any more than there is a 'Linux IDE'. Sure, on most Linux distros you can choose to install GNU C++, but also you might not. The development system is 'GNU/Linux'. You can also set up 'GNU/Solaris' by downloading GNU C++ and all other GNU stuff for solaris from www.sunfreeware.com for years. You don't even need to compile - the software is packaged ready for Solaris.
Also, Oracle allows you use their database for development and prototyping for free
That is not true. Well it made be true for you and your company, depending on what deal you guys cut, but not for everyone. I just spoke to oracle sales today about getting a license for our new dev environment and they said that we would have to pay for the same license that production runs. IE to run our dev environment on a dual CPU dell 4600 with the same DB features of the enterprise edition running in production we would have to buy the same license at the same price as the production license costs even though the dell has no where near the IO of the production machine. Hell if you want to use oracle data guard (TM) as a redunancy solution you have to buy an extra license for the backup machine even thought IT IS NOT ON!!!
Remember oracle didn't become the second largest and richest software corp buy givening things away, they well get their $ out of you in the end
Because Oracle is fast. Very, very fast. Not only is it fast, but it has serious database features. Its like putting a $30,000 engine in a Yugo
Oracle may be fast in comparision to other enterprise databases (Db2, sqlserver etc....) but for some applications/organisations it is just far to over the top. For small websites/apps the default SGA in 10g is just far to high + 90% of the features you don't need and if you haven't install it properly (IE seperate files on seperate disks 7 minium) plus tuned the schema's plus redo log groups etc it will just crawl and cause massive IO. So for some small apps and small companies oracle + DBA is just far to expensive and far to over the top to get the speed out of it. They would be far better off going mysql, sql server etc...
It said "windows 98 or better" so I installed Linux
Whether the database is disk intensive depends heavily on the type of applications you run on top of the database. For many Web applications, most of the operations is reading and you can have most of the data you need cached in RAM. The throughput of the database system is also heavily dependant on the way you use (or abuse) the database and its transaction manager.
As for the licencing fees, according to oraclestore.oracle.com, Oracle Standard Edition One costs USD 999 per processor per year. It is perfectly possible to run Oracle database on stock PC hardware, making it possible to upgrade to new processor and bus speeds at a fraction of cost of more up-scale hardware.
My Question is this, what version of oracle are you going to use? IE entprise, standard etc..
The chances are that if you are only looking at sub $1000 hardware the price of an oracle license is going to kill you.
But to answer your question I have setup oracle on redhat linux on a machine that was close to your specs for a "proof of concept" It was able to handle 4k-5k transactions a day without break to much of a sweet but big DB operations (IE full exports imports, sqlldr) really killed the machine and often took hours/days to complete even in direct mode. So short answer is if your data set is small (ie most sql's + result sets can be keep in the buffer cache/ram) and the app is transactional (not data warehouse type operation) and your concurrent user base if fairly small then yes a production oracle DB on that hardware can work just fine.
It said "windows 98 or better" so I installed Linux
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.
Our (yes, I work for Oracle) other web based Apps that have been built since 2001 all run on Mozilla too. Things work by and large on Konqueror (atleast 3.2.x) but there isn't much interest in officially supporting 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
Raw devices are only negligably faster, and much more of a pain in the as to actually use. from Oracle documentation:
Raw Devices
Raw devices are disk partitions or logical volumes that have not been formatted
with a file system. When you use raw devices for database file storage, Oracle
writes data directly to the partition or volume, bypassing the operating system file
system layer. For this reason, you can sometimes achieve performance gains by
using raw devices. However, because raw devices can be difficult to create and
administer, and because the performance gains over modern file systems are
minimal, Oracle recommends that you choose ASM or file system storage in
preference to raw devices.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I asked Eben Moglen the same question one time (he is the chief counsel for the EFF). And he says that actually there are ways of knowing, and he was confident he was doing a good job of keeping OSS out of non OSS products.
Ask anyone who has installed Oracle 8i or 9i on it's officially supported distro versions how easy and fun it is to get Oracle to install.
Applying patches to the _installer_ and hacking up scripts, screwing with compat libraries and the LD_* series of environment variables just to get the installer to run is not my idea of "supported".
--- polarbear
Sun produces and ships their own compiler and IDE suite called Forte. From my understanding the executables it's compiler generates are still signficantly faster then what gcc produces for the sparc platform.
I have not seen the telltale GCC strings in executables for many of the proprietary software packages I've installed and used on Solaris over the years.
--- polarbear
Anyway - when the hardware costs are dwarfed by the Oracle licence cost - why skimp on the hardware
The cost of licensing Oracle for development purposes is 0$. You only pay licenses for a production instance.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!