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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
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!
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...
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.
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"
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.
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
Now all they need to do is switch to Postgres. ^^
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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
I have found exactly the opposite: having used oracle from version 7, I have seen it run very nicely on positively archaic machines (ancient sparc systems), being robust, fast, and handling bizzare page-length SQL queries, with sub-selects and unions, that MySQL would not go near.
Newer Oracles are even better: 9 was a big step forward. Not resource intensive at all. I have Oracle 10 on a 256MB 2GHz AMD and it runs like a dream; just as fast as MySQL, even with lots of lightweight queries. Its not using that much of the memory - I have heavyweight Java IDEs running at the same time.
Older oracles did indeed try and be resource hogs. The trick with those is to install what you need and no more, and go into the resource specifications during setup (memory and disk use) and simply tell them to cut back.
I have been running Oracle 8 in 128MB on Solaris for years. If you are having trouble in 1GB, something is wrong.
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
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.