Slashdot Mirror
NZX Moves To Oracle On Linux
sn00ker writes "In this story in The New Zealand Herald, we learn that the NZX stock exchange has moved their database systems to Oracle running on RedHat Linux, running on commodity Intel-based hardware. What's really impressive are the performance numbers they're claiming. Quoth the article, "One key query - searching the data on historical trades to identify maximum trade values - has been cut from 36 seconds to 0.03 seconds." An improvement of over 1000 times is spectacular in anybody's books, and is one hell of a boost for the proponents of Linux at the back-end of the financial world."
Financial organizations are very conservative but even Deutsche Bank are migrating to Linux some of their less important processes.
In all the cases the future of the financial industry is in cheap linux clusters.
According to the artcle, they built a cluster using Oracle Real Application Cluster, (I guess Beowulf is just for toy apps :P) which allowed them to spread the core DB over multiple machines (!).
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
You don't need to buy licences for Solaris, it comes with the kit. If you mean proprietary in the sense that Sparc doesn't have the largest market share, then Sparc is proprietary - in the normal sense of the word it's a lot more open than Intel.
Using an Oracle RAC cluster of Sun V440s would have actually been cheaper than clustering 4 way Dells - Sparc kit's a lot cheaper than it was. You'd also have had some decent 64bit capable boxes. Check out the TPC/E benchmarks - Sun boxes blow everyone else away in terms of price/performance on a real world database app.
I've discovered that Oracle is pretty much OS agnostic because it pretty much takes over the system it is installed on. That aside, when a server is pure anything, the OS really isn't relivant. When all it does is run one app, the performance is pretty much tied to that app. All modren OSes provide good disk, memory, network, etc services. Now you can argue specifics till you are blue in the face, but when running one app, it doesn't much matter.
Where an OS can shine is if you are running lots of stuff (eg webserver, scripts, database server, media server all on one box) and espically when you are screwing around and hence likely to cause problems. However when you do a DB install and run nothing but that, the OS is just a helper. It talks to the hardware and provides some simple APIs. Which OS it is isn't of much consequence to performance.
The cost thing makes me curious too. We tried Solaris on Linux. The DBA couldn't get it to work, and neither could I. Then I looked at the requirements. We are trying SUSE, since that was listed... Well, sorta. It didn't run on normal SUSE, just SUSE Enterprise Server. Likewise not RedHat, but RHEL, and also UnitedLinux. In otherwords, high dollar server Linuxes. Oracle tech support wouldn't even talk to us unless we used a supported OS. We ended up option for Windows XP Pro, since it was supported. As I said, OS didn't much matter, just that it ran Oracle.
Now while I'm sure (or at least pretty sure) Oracle could be made to run on a non-enterprise Linux, what would be the point? They wouldn't support you and support is one of the big reasons to buy Oracle (not cheap in case you were wondering).
A significant section of the IT world think of linux as nothing more than a hobby Linux - that you can't rely on it for anything mission critical.
What this is saying is that Redhat Linux CAN foot it with the big (commerical) boys like Sun and Microsoft.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
I know something about the site. To the best of my knowledge those were 21 Access databases.
Wahooo, Oracle on Redhat beats Access!
>1) It won't work on stock SUSE or RedHat systems. Dunno why, but there must be something different in the enterprise versions because it won't install properly on the normal ones.
/etc/redhat-release file to fool the oracle installer.
the "strace" program helps here , it will tell you what function calls the program was making when it stopped.
I was at an oracle + RH installfest during oracle openworld in melbourne a few days ago , and was assisting people with laptops getting redhat and oracle 10i installed. There was a cheat sheet of sorts going around on how to install oracle on fedora , and one of the steps (IIRC) was to change the
So it can be done (at least on fedora).
Except the original press release wasn't really pro-Linux FUD (or anti-FUD), it was Oracle FUD. The claim was that switching to Oracle 10g got them the performance increase. The fact that it runs on a cluster of Linux boxes was mentioned as a cost factor, not a performance one.