Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
... 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.
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.